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.
Unfortunately any work on an alternative mobile OS is pointless as long as certain apps use hardware attestation to ban alternative OSes for “security”