As part of the KDE Plasma 6.5 release, we also got a new release of Plasma Mobile. As there’s a lot of changes, improvements, and new features in Plasma Mobile 6.5, the Plasma Mobile Team published a blog post to highlight them all. The biggest improvement is probably the further integration of Waydroid, a necessary evil to run Android applications until the Plasma Mobile ecosystem manages to become a bit more well-rounded. Waydroid can now be managed straight from the settings application and the quick settings dropdown.
Furthermore, the lockscreen has been improved considerably, there’s been a ton of polish for the home screen and the user interface in general, the quick settings panel can now be customised to make it fit better on different form factors, the first early test version of the new Plasma mobile keyboard is included, and so much more. This is definitely a release I would want to try out, but since I don’t have any of the supported devices, I’m a bit stuck.
This is, of course, one of the two major problems facing proper mobile Linux: the lack of device support. It’s improving due to the tireless work of countless volunteers, but they’re always going to be swimming upstream. The other major problem is, of course, application availability, but at least Waydroid can bridge the gap for the adventurous among us.
re: “problems facing proper mobile Linux: the lack of device support”, I want to make a somewhat offtopic remark, but still within the spirit of this platform: “agentic” coding tools will prove their worth when they will be able to effortlessly write drivers, allowing any hardware to work under any OS.
FriendBesto,
I agree that this is roadblock has proven stubbornly obnoxious for fans of the bring-your-own-os model.
To the extent that the hardware is known to be unlocked (ie doesn’t prevent the owner from flashing their own OS), then support is at least theoretically possible and the problem is one of developer resources to support every specific model. I do think AI could help automate this process. I wouldn’t place too much faith in a generic run of the mill LLM, but I do think a specially trained AI could do much better: reverse engineering OEM firmware and writing a compatible FOSS toolchain as output, ideally compatible with a mainline linux distro. It would be a great use of AI IMHO.
Also, once this AI is available, would the problem be “solved”, or would manufacturers be determined to respond with more device restrictions such that it’s always going to be a cat and mouse game to support devices?
It’s not just phones either. I’ve had to throw out scanners/printers/video capture boards/usb peripherals/smart speakers/smart IOT devices/etc on account unsupported devices & drivers. Open source would be the solution to all of this if you can find FOSS friendly hardware, but there-in lies the rub: so much commodity off the shell hardware has no FOSS support. So training an AI to both reverse engineer the drivers as well as jailbreak the hardware would be tremendously valuable for all sorts of FOSS applications. It would be interesting to throw my hat in the ring, but I wonder how much it would cost to pull off, I’m guessing quite a bit. And there are the usual questions over whether I could make back my time/money, which can be hard to do with FOSS if the work isn’t sponsored.
Unfortunately any work on an alternative mobile OS is pointless as long as certain apps use hardware attestation to ban alternative OSes for “security”