The user interface is designed using Plasma Quick, a declarative markup language allowing for organic user interface design based on Qt Quick.

ARM support is still in development? Given the landscape of smartphones and tablets, I wonder why that wasn't the first target.

Anyone have a list of Touchscreen monitors and tablets that work well with Xorg (pref Debian6 but if Deb7 is becoming stable enough...) Every time I have a go at dropping a distro on a device, it always dies with the lack of drivers for the touchscreens I have access to. I'd be interested in hearing what touchscreens work well. (can't play with the new KDE touchy interface without a touchy)

"Plasma Active runs on the proven Linux desktop stack, including the Linux kernel, Qt and KDE's Plasma Framework." Ugh. Somehow that doesn't sell me on their x86 tablet idea.

Hilarious. KDE going GNOME...

"Mobile devices have been influencing desktop software design for several years now. Mostly, I've not been impressed. Either the results are awkward, like GNOME 3, or over-simplified, like Ubuntu's Unity.

I had just about reached the conclusion that the mobile influence represented a step backwards in desktop design -- then I tried KDE's Plasma Active, a desktop designed for touch screen tablets, and all my assumptions were trampled underfoot.

Quite simply, Plasma Active is not only an elegant solution for small screens, but also for screens of any size. By any standards, it's an example of effective desktop design.

Unlike other recent desktops, Plasma Active is neither a conceptual re-design nor a new beginning. Rather, it is a sub-set of KDE -- a shell underlying the technology and concepts found in other incarnations of KDE."

"Why does Plasma Active work so well compared to other desktops designed for mobile devices or influenced by them? A comparison suggests several answers.

First, Plasma Active emphasizes Activities, but does not compel users to set up more than one. If you choose, you can even ignore the Activities Switcher altogether, and work within a single Activity.

Should a time ever comes when you want to experiment with a more sophisticated desktop, the controls are all unobtrusively tucked away at the edges of the screen. This is a flexibility that other recent desktops simply don't offer. In the last two GNOME releases, you have no choice except to use multiple workspaces, while Unity offers only its extreme simplification. In other words, Plasma Active accomodates different levels of users in a way that its counterparts do not.

Second, Plasma Active is focused on a single view. The contents of that view changes when you change Activities, but the orientation remains unchanged. Other features like the Activity Switcher and the Recommendations tab slide out to occupy the desktop -- but only part of it, and they are easily retractable. The advantage of this design is not just that users are unlikely to become disoriented, as they are with an overview or a menu that covers the entire screen, but that Plasma Active feels uncluttered and simple.

The single view also gives Plasma Active its third advantage: unity of design. It is intended for touchscreens, but the same design that works for a sweep of a finger works almost as well for a stroke of a mouse.

Either gesture is suitable for dragging out windows from the tabs and the panel, and, once you know to look for things to pull out, you need to know very little else to discover all of the desktop's functionality. Despite the fact that Plasma Active is actually a radical departure from the standard desktop, it doesn't feel like one, because it's unified design makes it simply to use.

Plasma Active comes late to the tablet desktop, but its ingenuity might just make it a player. While other desktops have been evoking alleged design principles to justify their efforts, without any fuss KDE has quietly shown more awareness of user's needs than any of them. If nothing else, its developers manage to avoid mistaking simple for over-simplifying.

I can't remember the last time a desktop seemed both so original and so promising."

...What does organic mean in this context?

People can't use the conventional KDE user interfaces in those devices with small screens and touchscreens, but not everything must be rebuilt :-)

Anyone have a list of Touchscreen monitors and tablets that work well with Xorg (pref Debian6 but if Deb7 is becoming stable enough...) Every time I have a go at dropping a distro on a device, it always dies with the lack of drivers for the touchscreens I have access to. I'd be interested in hearing what touchscreens work well. (can't play with the new KDE touchy interface without a touchy)

NVidia, TI, and Qualcomm each do their own thing in their little corner, and if it has not changed since the last time I checked, the only resource which they publicly provide to OS developers are binary Android drivers.

Well, to work as well as on x86, Linux on ARM would need two things : standard and well-documented hardware, and easy device reflashing.

Several major phone manufacturers are opening up their bootloaders, so we're getting there on the reflashing front. But as for standard and well-documented hardware... NVidia, TI, and Qualcomm each do their own thing in their little corner, and if it has not changed since the last time I checked, the only resource which they publicly provide to OS developers are binary Android drivers.

Probably someone will end up reverse engineering those or shoehorning them on Linux at some point, and we'll get something not very reliable and efficient like Nouveau, but for every piece of ARM hardware out there. The future of Linux on ARM, or every other alternative OS for that matter, does not look bright.

Outside of ARM http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTg3MA Texas Instruments Has New Open-Source Driver "While Texas Instruments released an open-source driver last year for the Linux kernel within the DRM area (the TILER driver), it didn't make it into the mainline tree for the lack of open-source user-space applications/drivers that could take advantage of it, i.e. the usual ARM graphics mess. Yesterday, however, Texas Instruments released a new open-source DRM driver for their OMAP platforms."

I believe Android drivers cannot be used directly on a kernel, without some kind of emulation. The two kernels are already sufficiently far away from each other to make drivers incompatible. Seems like I had forgotten that TI do provide Linux drivers though. That's already something.

I was looking for an actual tablet based on the TI OMAP platform

People can't use the conventional KDE user interfaces in those devices with small screens and touchscreens, but not everything must be rebuilt :-)

seems to be the only major desktop environment (aside from Xfce) that still has its sanity