Plasma Mobile on the Librem 5

[Matthias Klumpp]

2017-09-03 23:17 GMT+02:00 Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org>:
> Hey Zlatan,
> [...]
>> so I had discussion with our CEO and he is of course absolutely in.
>> To make clear our standpoint - both GNOME and KDE *will* be first
>> class citizen on Librem5. So there is no favorite between two, but
>> both are equal in this challenge.
>>
>> That said, looking in general code readiness between two, it would
>> appear that plasma mobile would be default in first wave of librems
>> (we are not releasing until one DE is ready for it and we will also
>> not wait for other DE to be ready but gradually add it). There is
>> some discussion in terms of offer - do we want to offer Librem5 with
>> choice of having Plasma or GNOME or do we have both right away inside
>> (maybe to heavy for such device)  so users can pick during boot-up?
>
> I'm not familiar with GNOME's strategy for a mobile UI (would love to
> know more however!), so for me it's hard to judge whether Plasma is
> technologically closer. From the Plasma side, I know that we're
> *currently* not good enough for anything end-user, so it will need a
> dedicated development push, and we need to rally the resources
> necessary for that.

Plasma is much further developed than GNOME though on the mobile front
- GNOME at the moment would require a vendor to commit to making GNOME
Mobile, which is a rather large task involving changes in all parts of
the GNOME platform. Plasma Mobile on the other hand has the groundwork
done already.

> I do know that there is a good amount of interest
> in the community, but my impression is also that many people are
> playing a waiting game for others to move before they're getting their
> hands dirty. This is something we need to resolve to get the ball really
> rolling. A decent plan and coordination of these effort is definitely
> needed, and this is something we should come up with first. Build and
> they will come.

Indeed!

> [...]
>> Also, while currently we are offering PureOS with GNOME as default on
>> Librem13/15, I think there is future for KDE as desktop offering by
>> default as well (also as an option PureOS GNOME and PureOS Plasma/KDE)
>> because the convergence might be very interesting choice for many
>> users and your desktop is very modular for fine tweaking.
>
> I haven't looked into the packaging for the device, so it's hard to
> comment on that. I can imagine that Plasma is something people would
> want to run on the device, and it makes a story of complementary
> devices both running Plasma more compelling, so I think we should at
> least have an answer to that.
>
> That said, I'm not familiar with packaging for PureOS, and KDE is just
> getting ready to flatpak things.

Don't worry about that - PureOS is basically a combination of Debian
with things the FSF doesn't like stripped out, combined with some good
ideas from the Tanglu debian derivative. Anything that runs on Debian
runs on PureOS as well.

> I'm not sure in how far flatpacking
> the DE is an option, but I guess Matthias can weigh in here as well.

Flatpacking a DE is a bad idea. Flatpak is strictly for applications,
and does not work well (or at all, depending on the specifics) for
anything that's more than an app. For example, the desktop needs to
provide the portals implementation, fire up the user/session DBus on
startup, communicate with the display manager, and in general
integrate well with the rest of the OS. It also doesn't benefit much
from being sandboxed, since it launches applications that would
inherit the sandboxing policies of their parent, which can cause all
kind of problems.

For the phone base system, I envision a system similar to what
EndlessOS[1] currently is. This will require quite a bit of
redesigning of PureOS to work well with OSTree[2] and build OSTree
images automatically from packages, but will work much better on a
phone. Apps should be in Flatpaks, but that is also something I can
help with (although last time I looked at it, all work was done in KDE
already).
In any case, don't worry about the base OS and plumbing layer for now
:-) That will work well no matter which UX sits on top.

> We
> do have some expertise in the Plasma team as well, but so far the DE
> itself hasn't been the primary target of our flatpak efforts, we've
> more concentrated on apps.

Don't try flatpacking the DE, it won't be a good investment of time
(Ubuntu's Snappy system works differently here in that it allows
making snaps of pretty much anything, even system components - last
time I heard though that even Ubuntu would stick with .deb package for
longer though).
Flatpak is strictly for apps, and at the moment even more strictly for
apps that have a graphical user interface.

> [...]

Cheers,
    Matthias