This blog post is already quite long, so it will omit changes merged for Plasma 6.5 (releasing in October, to be announced in a future post).
With the Plasma 6.2 release, we moved Plasma Dialer and Spacebar to the Plasma release cycle, allowing us to have consistent releases of the two apps. This completes our year long move to having all Plasma Mobile related projects released as part of wider KDE releases, streamlining the work for distributions and taking a load off us on having to maintain a separate release cycle!
In other news, a Fedora spin for Plasma Mobile was released! It will only be targeting devices that can currently boot Fedora (i.e. not ARM phones), but is very exciting nonetheless!
Sort of. Whatever hardware these are intended to run on require something like 3X the driver code (at least in the case of the Android Linux kernel, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman). Phones tend to have more specialized and proprietary hardware, so you can’t just take the standard Linux kernel, use it there, and call it a day.
But I’d be surprised if the people working on this weren’t aware of that fact, and I hope they are working on abstracting the hardware layers more so that every mobile Linux project doesn’t have to start from scratch every time.
Edit: source (YouTube, sorry) for the claim about how much driver code is required for mobile devices.
That would make sense, though I was asking about the “solid base”, not the “driver layer”.
I mean, Linux is the driver layer, and you mentioned GNU (userspace) / Linux (hardware layer), and the Linux part of that solid base can’t just be the vanilla Linux kernel that you’d run on a computer.
Yeah I could’ve phrased that better. I was thinking more process management, coreutils, networking, device interfaces, rendering, window manager, etc.
Eh, you sort of can on some phones, e.g. OnePlus 5 and 6; on some others it’s just a couple dozen patches away from working.
The problem with other phones isn’t “abstracting the hardware” (this is done by the Linux kernel), it’s reverse-engineering the drivers so that they run on whatever kernel you want and use the open standards required by the “desktop linux” userspace. In fact, if you look at the “supported devices” list for all those mobile Linux distros you’ll find a fairly similar set; that’s simply all devices for which manufacturer’s (or reverse-engineered) drivers are available. It’s not like FOSS people are writing drivers specifically for their distro, which wouldn’t work with any other - only corporate Android vendors do that!
I highly doubt that those “couple dozen” patches are trivial though. Even Pixel devices can’t run the vanilla mainline kernel without a bunch of added code to make it work with the hardware (see: the Greg KH interview I linked).
And abstracting the hardware is what you do when you make drivers, so this is a distinction without a difference.
Yes, what I’m saying is that Mobile Linux people are typically doing just that, sometimes also trying to upstream it as well. I don’t see how else they could be “working on abstracting the hardware”.