Plasma/Mobile/General

What is Plasma Mobile

Plasma Mobile offers a Free (as in Freedom and beer), user-friendly, privacy-enabling and customizable platform for mobile devices. There's a prototype providing basic functionality that is running on a limited, but growing range of Android devices using the Halium project. Currently Plasma Mobile is under heavy development and unfortunately can't be used as a daily driver.

Halium isn't Plasma Mobile: Halium is only providing support to packing a basic android system based upon LineageOS into an LXC container into a normal GNU/Linux system. Then the host system is able to use the proprietary android firmware into a normal system using libhybris, which is the simplest way without reverse-engineering all drivers. Unfortunately this way the often outdated android kernels still need to be used.

Why?

The most common offerings on mobile devices lack openness and trust. In a world of walled gardens, we want to create a platform that respects and protects the user's privacy to the fullest. We want to provide a fully open base which others can help develop and use for themselves, or in their products.

What's the status?

Plasma Mobile is available as a developer prototype running on about 10 Android devices using Halium. This number is constantly increasing as there are more and more device ports on Halium, you can find a list of the finished and unfinished ports on GitHub and on the Halium Wiki. Their supported features differ and it's the best if you look up a specific device port for that information.

But don't think Plasma Mobile can't do anything, there are already some features available: making and receiving phone calls, navigation via. Marble and image viewing using Koko. This is not a promise that it will work on all devices, because most of the Halium ports are still missing some fixes and the provided KDE Neon system also needs debugging.

Where can I find...

More info, such as installation instructions, is available in the Plasma Mobile Wiki and on the Plasma Mobile website. The code for various Plasma Mobile components can be found on git.kde.org. You can also ask your questions in the Plasma Mobile community groups and channels.