For the last decade, the mobile market has been under complete lockdown. Unless you were Android or iOS, you didn’t stand a chance at making much of a run at success. Canonical failed miserably with the Ubuntu Phone. Blackberry had to resort to their own take on Android. Firefox OS couldn’t even get off the ground.
And yet, thanks to the Purism Librem 5, there’s another attempt at creating an open source mobile platform on the horizon. Many of us prognosticators and pundits have been ansty to see what’s to come for this platform, and finally someone has made some headway, and that’s KDE. The platform is Plasma Mobile. From the looks of it, KDE is on to something.
I’m going to preface this by saying I worked with Plasma Mobile on a VirtualBox VM—which is obviously not the target environment. Couple that with the fact this is a very early release and you have one unstable operating system.
However unstable Plasma Mobile may be at the moment, it offers a glimpse into what is in store for the platform, and it’s pretty impressive. Where Canonical attempted and failed miserably to complete reinvent the wheel, Plasma Mobile uses what KDE does best and reworks it into a metaphor that functions very well for the mobile space. Of course, by “functions very well” I can only assume that it’s not very useful at the moment.
Source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-kdes-plasma-mobile-is-the-ideal-platform-for-linux-fans-and-developers/
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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