Plasma Mobile on the Librem 5

[Zlatan Todoric]

On 09/03/2017 11:17 PM, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> Hey Zlatan,
>
> On Sat, 2 Sep 2017 17:23:09 +0200
> Zlatan Todoric <zlatan.todoric at puri.sm> wrote:
>
>> (Cleared all previous mails to make this one more visible, feel free
>> to respond on this one while quoting previous replies in this thread)
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> 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. 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.

GNOME is basically not ready at all. The GTK3 is not for mobile use and
it will not get any updates regarding that (it is considered stable, in
frozen state and they don't want to break ABI). GTK4 has potential to be
mobile ready toolkit but that can be a year or two away and someone
would still need to write entire UI for it.

I heard about the issue of plasma mobile community not having energy to
push things forward as they didn't have the device for it but now we
have a chance to finally have device and not play at all in Android
world and all the hassle those devices bring with for developing Free OS.

>
> On the other hand, the offering of non-Android Free software mobile
> workspaces and apps have, with the demise of Firefox OS and Ubuntu
> become pretty thin, and the best we can hope from that rather
> disappointing development is that a consolidation will bundle
> resources and get the community together with more focus. 

Yep, I hope we will get campaign out, so we can revive entire community
around it and create collaboration and growth that will connect all dots
for entire community (I consider Purism just as part of larger
community) so we can create something unique and break status quo.

>
>> 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.

PureOS is basically Debian - and I as Purism CTO and as Debian Developer
invite entire community to help make KDE as best as possible for user
experience.

>
> That said, I'm not familiar with packaging for PureOS, and KDE is just
> getting ready to flatpak things. I'm not sure in how far flatpacking
> the DE is an option, but I guess Matthias can weigh in here as well. 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. I'd be interesting to know, perhaps we can
> use the Librem notebooks as potential targets when we think about how we
> want to make deployment of Plasma possible. I suppose it's a good way
> to get Plasma ready for deployment on the handheld devices as well.
> These kind of deployment scenarios are actually at the heart of
> Plasma's cross device strategy, so I'd love to find out more.

Flatpak'ing DE is not something you should do. Flatpaks are meant for
graphical apps. I think the best possible combination for wider
community is to have base OS and base DE components as .deb's and have
upstream make flatpak of their end-user apps. For OS/DE security we plan
to enable AppArmor as default because in my Debian tests (I run few
devices with it enabled), all works without a single issue atm (or I am
too dumb to notice an issue ;) ). Yea, Librems are a nice hardware - I
think we could create special coupon for interested KDE devs to get some
good discount on them (all interested can mail mak or me personally and
I will get them).

>
>> Now that is said - what suggestion do you have for a meeting around
>> promoting collaboration between Purism and KDE regarding Librem5?
>> Videoconferencing or async via mail? Other tools? I would add to the
>> discussion our CEO, CMO and Director of Creative.
> Video would probably work best, a phone conference is also an option.
> Plasma and KDE promo people are mostly in Europe, but I'm sure we can
> make something work, even if it's outside of office hours (I don't
> mind). 

As said in previous mail, I will create separate thread to propose that.

>
> Cheers,
Z