Questions about Plasma Mobile

[Bart Ribbers]

Hey,

> When installing Plasma Mobile onto a Nexus 5, will Plasma Mobile communicate
> directly with the hardware of the phone or will certain components of
> Android be left behind to serve as a middle man between the hardware and
> Plasma Mobile?

Nitpick: Plasma Mobile is just the shell/DE you're using. The OS underneath is 
what determines this. In case you're talking about the reference OS (KDE 
Neon), then yes a compatibility layer is used to make use of Android drivers. 
It's called Halium, which uses libhybris underneath to make Android drivers 
work on proper Linux systems. You can read this on the website (https://
www.plasma-mobile.org/get/).
If you don't want to use any proprietary Android drivers, postmarketOS is 
recommended instead (it has Plasma Mobile as one of the available interfaces).

> Also, what carriers are compatible with Plasma Mobile (I am specifically
> interested in Verizon, but I want to know of all the compatible carriers)
> or does that depend on the physical phone and not the OS on it?

That depends on the physical phone as far as I know.

> I understand that Plasma Mobile is working with Purism on a secure phone but
> will I reap any security/privacy benefits by installing Plasma Mobile on a
> Nexus 5?

In terms of privacy you don't really gain much over using AOSP or a different 
Android ROM like LineageOS or Replicant. In terms of security you do gain some 
benefits as phones tend to be longer supported than the 2 years most Android 
manufacturers give you. The Nexus 5 especially gets improved security if you 
use the mainline kernel on it, which is at least supported on postmarketOS but 
I'm not sure about KDE Neon, as you'll not be stuck on the outdated kernel 
that shipped with the phone like on Android.

Cheers,
Bart

On Sunday, 13 January 2019 23:42:06 CET user-zaz at protonmail.com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> When installing Plasma Mobile onto a Nexus 5, will Plasma Mobile communicate
> directly with the hardware of the phone or will certain components of
> Android be left behind to serve as a middle man between the hardware and
> Plasma Mobile?
> 
> Also, what carriers are compatible with Plasma Mobile (I am specifically
> interested in Verizon, but I want to know of all the compatible carriers)
> or does that depend on the physical phone and not the OS on it?
> 
> I understand that Plasma Mobile is working with Purism on a secure phone but
> will I reap any security/privacy benefits by installing Plasma Mobile on a
> Nexus 5?
> 
> Thank you for your time.