Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Plasma Mobile

plasma-mobile.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 141 posts

Re: Plasma Mobile

#51

Post by sho_hn »

soapdog wrote: post #47
sho_hn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, here's the stack as a quick recap: Kubuntu with systemd + Android GPU driver via libhybris + kwin as Wayland display server and compositor (with a hwcomposer backend for the renderer) + plasmashell + phone shell package. Ofono for GSM. Regular Linux desktop bits for everything else. This different from e.g. Firefox OS which relies on Android's SurfaceFlinger as display server, or Ubuntu Phone which uses their…

Great project, can`t wait to play with it. Just a little nitpick, as far as I know Firefox OS is not using SurfaceFlinger but talking direct to the GL layer.

Looks like you're entirely right: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Arch...

Sorry! FWIW, there's an old ZTE Open bought retail during a KDE event in Spain on this desk somewhere and I consider Firefox OS a a Very Good Thing. :)

Re: Plasma Mobile

#52

Post by jbk »

veeti wrote: post #30
jbk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The front page is just a marketing thingie. Look at the video. It looks great.

You must have some very low standards for "looking great". Like they say, this is a prototype and it shows. The design is all over the place. The one thing that sticks out the most is that there is no sense of scale at all. Everything is either ridiculously huge or tiny. For example, look at the compact status bar: really small text and icons. Then look at the navigation icons on the bottom of the screen, the dialer…

> You must have some very low standards for "looking great".

For an early project, no, it's quite nice. They did not change a thing from QML apps, and it works fine already, without any design changes.

> The design is all over the place.

The design is clearly not all over the place, and is way better than any early Android or Ubuntu version. It's an early prototype.

Re: Plasma Mobile

#53

Post by jbk »

RivieraKid wrote: post #15
emilsedgh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe contribute to it then? :) Disclaimer: I contribute to kde.

I've been actually thinking about creating a new desktop environment (or a whole desktop platform ala Android if I had more time). Because there's a lot of space for improvement and innovation on (not only) Linux desktop. But this is not the case for mobile IMHO. As for contributing to KDE, it's not as fun as starting a new project, things move slowly, you have limited options of what you can do and I just generally…

> I've been actually thinking about creating a new desktop environment

Stop thinking and actually do and ship!

You keep complaining and say you know better, then show us!

Re: Plasma Mobile

#54

Post by jbk »

RivieraKid wrote: post #17
jlas wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good enough for the mostly tech-oriented users that interact with it though.

I've heard several years ago that their UI philosophy is to target advanced users. No problem with that specifically (although one could argue that you can target casual and advanced users at the same time without much compromises). But their implementation of this philosophy seems to be - "don't think whether it's a good idea to put this button here, just make it an option in the settings". Which is clearly wrong.

> I've heard several years ago that their UI philosophy is to target advanced users.

Citation needed. From who? From where?

Re: Plasma Mobile

#55

Post by keithpeter »

wz1000 wrote: post #40
veeti wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the good old "submit a patch if you don't like it". This is a common problem all throughout the user interface shown, not an isolated issue. And as mentioned, it's a _prototype_: I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say this is far, far from the final user interface anyway.

In the end, it is a community effort. It needs people from the community to contribute. If you think you can do something better, I really encourage you to do so.

UI design - how would someone with strong views (and experience!) on gestures and UI features but with little coding experience get involved? Just put some mocks somewhere and post them to where the UI team meet?

Edit: In fact, where do the people interested in UI design actually meet and make their sausages in KDE? I can't seem to find a central place similar to http://design.canonical.com/

There is this gap between having the programming knowledge to 'submit a patch' and other kinds of large scale organisation/design skill.

Disclaimer: not me I'm a civilian.

Re: Plasma Mobile

#56

Post by sho_hn »

fit2rule wrote: post #9
jbk wrote: post #2

So, there is not much information on the website yet, but this is basically a full stack for mobiles, based on Wayland and Kwin for the UI and Ofono for the phone part. The reference implementation is based on Ubuntu Touch, and use libhybris to get hw support. However, it's different from UT, by the fact that it's not using Mir, but Wayland directly through Kwin. It seems to run Ubuntu Touch applications, X11 applica…

I'd be very interested in porting MOAI to this - do you know if it supports SDL, or OpenGL ES apps?

It does! The shell UI itself is a GLES app, and SDL 2.x has experimental Wayland support.

Re: Plasma Mobile

#57

Post by sho_hn »

wvh wrote: post #36

Exciting stuff. I think it's important there is a solid open-source stack on mobile, even if most people won't leave iOS or Android behind. Is there any cooperation with the Jolla or Ubuntu folks, perhaps through the Mer project or common Qt development? It would be good to avoid duplicate work. Have you been thinking about the hardware problem in the long run? Jolla has apparently decided to leave the hardware busin…

> Is there any cooperation with the Jolla or Ubuntu folks, perhaps through the Mer project or common Qt development?

Aye. There's been some overlap on both on code and manpower between Plasma Mobile and Sailfish, and the KDE community is a major contributor to upstream Qt[0,1], including to code used by all of us.

0 = http://pusling.com/blog/?p=362

1 = https://dot.kde.org/2013/02/14/akademy-and-qt-contributors-s...

Re: Plasma Mobile

#59

Post by shadeslayer »

joshuapants wrote: post #13
RivieraKid wrote: post #12

Yeah... new mobile platform is a really hard thing to do - and without a designer (whom they clearly don't have), it's impossible. Nobody will use this.

Let's be honest, even if they did have a talented team of designers nobody would use this.

>Let's be honest, even if they did have a talented team of designers nobody would use this.

Why?

Re: Plasma Mobile

#60

Post by afro88 »

sho_hn wrote: post #39
afro88 wrote: post #7

Free OS on your phone is great and all, but it's got that quirky linux UI problem where usability is an after thought to "me too" features. For example, I can't read any of the text on the phone image on the front page, and physically the image on my screen is bigger than my iPhone. So the text is unreadable in the OS by default?

FWIW, this is very early and not representative of where we want the UI to be. A lot of our effort so far has gone into e.g. getting our Wayland story sorted out (we knew we wanted to be Wayland from day 1 on the phone, and do it properly to where every line of code we write also gets Plasma Desktop closer to being on Wayland) and getting all our service infrastructure ducks in a row on a phone device. Our community…

Fair enough. I know my post was quite negative, but the first thing people see is that first page. It's definitely worth making that initial image look like something you can and would want to use. Text so small as to be unreadable, on a huge screen, was just a big red flag for me.
Post reply on HN