> If you are interested in developing, you will be getting early access to an ambitious Free Software mobile platform and you can help contribute to Plasma Mobile and get a headway designing new apps that you can test and deploy right now.
Any link to this? How do I make a simple hello world in Plasma Mobile :)
Great to see that, congratulations to everybody involved.
Is the hardware of Pinephone considered stable?
How is the development on such platform, the same a on Desktop GNU/Linux? Do we have a permission system similar to Android? Can we launch easily background application and awake the phone when needed (for notifications)? Is there a documentation on the packaging system?
How long can the battery last at the moment (with mostly idle phone)?
There has been some hardware improvements between the braveheart edition and KDE Community edition. For example the convergence functionality was added. Afaik the Manjaro and KDE edition will be using the same hardware.
> How is the development on such platform, the same a on Desktop GNU/Linux? Do we have a permission system similar to Android? Can we launch easily background application and awake the phone when needed (for notifications)? Is there a documentation on the packaging system?
The development for Plasma Mobile is similar to the one on the desktop. You can ever develop completely on the desktop or ssh in the phone and compile there. Packaging system is the same as on the desktop and depends on the distro. Flatpak also works as cross distribution solution ;)
> How long can the battery last at the moment (with mostly idle phone)?
Good question. This varies a lot by the software used and the distributions. At the beginning it was less than 2 hours but with a lot of improvements in the kernel, there was reports varying from 12 to 16 hours idle time. This will probably improve further with more improvements in the kernel and in the hardware stack.
yes I'm aware of it, I'm deeply involved in XMPP community (XSF member) and have met Kaidan devs a couple of times (it's a promising client BTW).
My client (Salut à Toi) predates Kaidan by years and is not focusing only on instant messaging, also it's not the same technology stack and the mobile frontend uses Kivy, which is well adapted for touch screen.
Hi! Do the Plasma Mobile developers also provide a distro for the Phone? Is it KDE Neon (Ubuntu) based?
What kind of collaboration is there between the various developers for the PinePhone? There seem to be a lot of Kernels with different patches for HW acceleration, IC power management, modem operation etc [1]. Do you apply these to your kernel?
Plasma Mobile is the desktop and related components (open to correction). There are apparently different distributions (based on Arch, Ubuntu and others [1]).
My question is what the Plasma Mobile PinePhone ships with and if it maintained by the Plasma Mobile team themselves. The Plasma Mobile says that the Ubuntu Neon based one is "official" with confusing double quotes. The blog [2] says that image has been rebased on Ubuntu 20.04. Is this what the KDE PinePhone ships with? If so, what kernel does it use and are the patches I linked to previously included?
I think you might be confusing the Linux distribution with the desktop environment. "Plasma" and "Plasma Mobile" are examples of the latter, while "Ubuntu" is the former. One can switch desktop environments with a Linux distribution to customize its look and feel - e.g. if I install Ubuntu on my PC, I can choose Plasma (KDE's offering), Gnome, or XFCE to be my desktop environment. OTOH, I could also choose to install Arch Linux - a different distribution - and still choose between those same options (or more, I only listed 3) for a desktop environment to customize it.
I don't think the parent is confusing these notions. I don't know what distribution will be pre-installed on the KDE community edition, but the KDE project provides pre-built images based on Neon, which is Ubuntu with up to date KDE things on it. Plasma mobile also runs on Postmarket OS and Manjaro, and also Arch I think.
When I briefly tried Neon on Wednesday, it was based on Ubuntu 20.04 and the 5.7 kernel if I remember correctly. Mobian is using kernel 5.9. I hope the pre-installed distribution will have an up to date kernel with latest patches. I also hope that it will be possible to install the latest versions of Plasma Mobile on Mobian in the near future too.
>I don't think the parent is confusing these notions.
I'm not (I've even maintained distro spins). I am at a loss how anyone could read my question and think otherwise ;).
> I hope the pre-installed distribution will have an up to date kernel with latest patches.
That's precisely what I want to find out. I've seen so many blog posts and forum threads about different PinePhone builds. It's like the best and worst of Android ROM development from the XDA forums.
Different people seem to be hacking on different thing (which is fun) and many are attempting to get things upstreamed but the development seems to be all over the place. It's not clear what builds have safety features like the Power IC limits enabled for example.
The only "exception" being one carrier in the USA does not seem to work with ofono (the underlying framework) yet, but that issue was also with the previous UBports edition.
But I am admittedly more familiar with the Phosh stack versus the KDE stack. Are you then using ofono and that is providing a working MMS support for the Pinephone?
(Sorry I am not trying to be confrontational, it would be amazing if MMS works!)
So I cannot speak to ofono, but modemmanager largely does support MMS, with two exceptions:
- The APN for mobile broadband needs to be the same for MMS (modemmanager does not have support for multiple APNs yet), and
- "transfer-route MT messages" aren't implemented (which some carriers use for MMS, but it is not clear for me to how).
The larger issue is that there is no stack on phosh to support any of this. I proposed a couple of ideas of how such as stack would work on their git site, but I don't have the time to impliment it.
From what I saw with scapebar, it does not have native support to send picture messages (MMS), does not recieve picture messages, and did not have a way to send a group message (MMS). I am admittedly not familiar enough with ofono to know what works or how it functions in the stack. However, there is MMS support in the patched ofono stack below:
Biggest question: Can I send SMS, on this phone, from another computer?
The biggest reason I ditched my iPhone for Android was the excellent implementation of in-browser messaging, to and from my phone, on any computer with a web browser.
I don't need to be able to text from "any computer with a web browser", but if I could send SMS from Win / Mac / Linux machines that I owned, that would be a huge incentive for me to give this platform a shot.
There is KDE Connect. You can easily respond to texts from that.
Barring that, sending a text is a simple one-liner in the terminal. Worst case, you can just run the command via ssh or whatever other workflow you may want.
I hadn't heard about the new support for MMS, that's fantastic news! It's such an important part of group messaging in the U.S. that not having access to it was a huge blocker for me in terms progress towards daily driver status.
Hi! What is the state of running regular Android apps on Plasma? I heard of Anbox, but does this actually work? I'm interested in running my bank's app on PinePhone.
I can't speak for Anbox support on Pinephone, but regarding your bank's Android app it probably uses Google Safetynet, which I don't think Anbox has support for, or will ever support. Without Safetynet the app will probably not function, or will function with limited features.
To add to my sibling comment's remark about SafetyNet, you miiiight be able to make something happen with Magisk or some other form of SafetyNet spoofing but that's a very deep rabbit hole. Also potentially a legal gray area. The sort of configuration that no dev of anything involved would be willing to support! Still, all hope might not be lost. YMMV.
Anbox "works" on the Pinephone, but takes ages to boot (several minutes), is really slow and eventually crashes the phone, in my experience (tried on Neon and Manjaro). I haven't managed to do anything useful with it.
I wonder if we'll reach a point where Anbox runs okay on the Pinephone, it seems super heavy. Anbox emulates a complete Android system after all...
Is Plasma Mobile up to running on tablets now? I got an MS Surface Go 10 months ago and at the time Plasma Mobile didn't support auto screen rotation, so for now I'm running Gnome. (I'd like to switch.)
Anglefish has been build specially for Plasma Mobile and use Kirigami (the framework powering most of the PlaMo apps) and QtWebEngine (based on Blink).
Firefox sadly doesn't give us any ways to just use the web engine and do our own UI on top of it. It's a bit sad because Firefox is my preferred web browser on the desktop.
One could guess it's because Plasma Angelfish want to be well integrated into the rest of the KDE ecosystem (works well with Plasma, has KDE wallet integration and all that jazz). I think Angelfish is based on webkit (via Qt) as well, for better or worse.
It would be great if Plasma Mobile would look into supporting JetPack Compose which has been ported to Linux Desktop by JetBrains.
Even if I want to learn QML there is only so many things I could do in a day even if I want to. Plus JetPack Compose brings huge developer base to Plasma Mobile.
Android has an Hardware Abstraction Layer (Android HAL) that acts as a unique central clean definition of what the hardware provides and how to access it. It makes it easier for Android to remain HW agnostic and for HW vendor to be compatible with Android.
Plasma Mobile works fine on a mainline Linux kernel with a GNU userspace so there is no need to create an additional abstraction layer.
There is a project called Halium that allowed in the early days to run plasma mobile on top of the Android userspace, but we stopped working on it when all the plasma developers got their Pinephone and this was easier to work with.
How do you see this develop in the future, especially concerning the convergence aspect of it - the ability to hook it up to a monitor and use it as a real desktop computer. Please provide your own personal and unofficial opinion.
The Pinephone supports convergence, but there is still a lot of work needed on the software side. The under-laying technology "Plasmashell" is able to run different view modes: the traditional desktop mode, the mobile mode and the smart tv mode (https://plasma-bigscreen.org/). The missing link is the possibility to switch the view at runtime.
Now while I think the feature is cool, I'm not sure how useful it is. I don't really see myself using it and would prefer in almost all the case using my thinkpad with a good processor and plenty of RAM. This might change with future versions of the Pinephone getting more powerful with the time. For the moment, I'm happy to have the convergence of the applications with Kirigami, so that I only need to develop them once and use a similar interface on both my phone and laptop. And having KDE Connect to share stuff between my phone and my laptop.
For me the desktop capability of it is the most exciting thing. There are lots tasks i can do that don't require powerful cpu and lots of ram. I can even see myself developing in certain cases where i can just remote into a dedicated workstation - seeing what games mobile phones can run, it's not hard to imagine one can run a thing like vscode in client mode.
It can be very useful if you use all HW acceleration Allwinner SoCs can give you to make PinePhone into a portable movie player. :) Hook it up to a TV via HDMI port in a hotel and play anything you like. It can achieve quite some performance that way:
Other side of Allwinner SoC business is making TV box SoC (H* series of SoC), and it shows on A64 too.
It can do video playback at 60FPS HW scaled to larger 1440p displays, for example. Including audio over HDMI. This is already working with current gstreamer and kernel.
Because it's quite hard to get more modern and powerful processors to work with a mainline Linux kernel and because of this, these processors are only working with Android.
