KDE Plasma Mobile On Track To End 2020 With Quite A Polished Linux Mobile Experience

[doomie]

I have a lot of equipment that needs ether Android or IOS apps for me to be able to work. I wish the devs the best but I couldn't consider this unless I could run those apps even if I have to side load them and they will never be ported to this OS. Breaking into this market is a Hurculean effort becuase of the absolute stranglehold the two big players have over both the app makers and the telecom companies.

completely valid (and i'm so sorry to hear it), but then again, there is a huge market for this stuff, at least potentially, even without android apps. i know many many people who would buy such phones, but who don't move in the right circles or frequent sites like this to even read about them. when the phones are ready, it'll take some word-of-mouth (aka viral marketing), but that's actually very effective, and don't underestimate how many normies are interested in many of the advantages of OSS and/or consumer- or privacy-focused phones, AND not everyone depends on the big two gatekeepers to live... yet.

people who don't depend on android to live, but also don't mind planned obsolescence, walled gardens and spyware will never have a reason to buy anything but the most competitive spyware and consoomer-funded phone, because those phones will always thus have the edge on price + perf. those people just pay in frequency of purchase, maintenance costs and loss of privacy, security, choice and rights... a fair trade in many people's eyes.

so, "Breaking into this market is a Hurculean effort" kinda depends on the market, though it is taking a lot of effort no matter how you look at it.

[Baguy]

Does it support VoLTE?

Yes the pinephone supports VoLTE. AT&T and T-Mobile work the best in America (I've tested both personally and used T-Mobile on it when i used my pinephone as a daily driver). Verizon gives alot of trouble, and I've heard Sprint does too.

[Baguy]

Can it be used on other phones than pine phone?

Yes, Plasma Mobile can run on other devices. PostmarketOS has it packaged, so it should run on any support PMOS device.

[Corodius]

But I would love to see one of these distros make a x86 oriented port.

KDE Neon has a plasma mobile x86 version specifically designed for testing and tablets etc. Might be worth a look?

[oiaohm]

I have a lot of equipment that needs ether Android or IOS apps for me to be able to work. I wish the devs the best but I couldn't consider this unless I could run those apps even if I have to side load them and they will never be ported to this OS. Breaking into this market is a Hurculean effort becuase of the absolute stranglehold the two big players have over both the app makers and the telecom companies.

https://anbox.io/

Most of the OS that install in the pinephone are at core standard Linux distributions this includes KDE Plasma. This does mean if you do all the steps to install anbox you can have anbox to run android applications. This is not without its problems

The problems
1) google play you have to side load that if you want it. Of course pinephone and anbox are not google approved devices so particular Android applications will not work and will not install by google play because Digital Rights Management crud fails. Like if all the applications you use come from fdroid for example you are in business. Google play is a little more dicey.

2) RAM this is a big one. Pinephones have between 2 to 3G of ram. This turns out not to be a lot when you are running two userspaces with two userspaces background services. I know with raspberry pis using anbox this problems goes away when you have 8G of ram.

3) CPU pinephone is Cortex-A53 X 4 so you are not playing with the biggest processor here and now you are splitting it.

4) Battery life. This is the two userspaces problem. You are running more stuff you eat more battery.

Notice 3 of these problems are hardware linked and maybe overcome by using next generation of device. 1 is google themselves.


Its really simple to forgot android has a Linux kernel at core with a few extra drivers. That why anbox is able to work they are able to add the extra drivers and place the open source parts of Android in a container.

Linux Desktop OSs coming a mobile OS is in quite a good place to take on Android.
The hard bits:
1) getting good enough hardware that it can.
2) getting the rough edges on power and so on fixed up for good in Linux Desktop OS solutions..

Remember all the Linux Desktop OSs can solve the Android compatibility problem in a single project they don't have to-do it individually.

[Quackdoc]

https://anbox.io/

Most of the OS that install in the pinephone are at core standard Linux distributions this includes KDE Plasma. This does mean if you do all the steps to install anbox you can have anbox to run android applications. This is not without its problems

The problems
1) google play you have to side load that if you want it. Of course pinephone and anbox are not google approved devices so particular Android applications will not work and will not install by google play because Digital Rights Management crud fails. Like if all the applications you use come from fdroid for example you are in business. Google play is a little more dicey.

2) RAM this is a big one. Pinephones have between 2 to 3G of ram. This turns out not to be a lot when you are running two userspaces with two userspaces background services. I know with raspberry pis using anbox this problems goes away when you have 8G of ram.

3) CPU pinephone is Cortex-A53 X 4 so you are not playing with the biggest processor here and now you are splitting it.

4) Battery life. This is the two userspaces problem. You are running more stuff you eat more battery.

Notice 3 of these problems are hardware linked and maybe overcome by using next generation of device. 1 is google themselves.


Its really simple to forgot android has a Linux kernel at core with a few extra drivers. That why anbox is able to work they are able to add the extra drivers and place the open source parts of Android in a container.

Linux Desktop OSs coming a mobile OS is in quite a good place to take on Android.
The hard bits:
1) getting good enough hardware that it can.
2) getting the rough edges on power and so on fixed up for good in Linux Desktop OS solutions..

Remember all the Linux Desktop OSs can solve the Android compatibility problem in a single project they don't have to-do it individually.

unfortunately anhox isn't most stable of programs. even doing a clean install on recommended setup I've had nothing but issues with it. it's hardly in a place where I could recommend someone using it for business, hell I would recommend someone use KVM and an Android x86 virtual machine first and that's not without its issues

[oiaohm]

unfortunately anhox isn't most stable of programs. even doing a clean install on recommended setup I've had nothing but issues with it. it's hardly in a place where I could recommend someone using it for business, hell I would recommend someone use KVM and an Android x86 virtual machine first and that's not without its issues

Anbox issues I will give it has quite a few. Particularly that it stuck on Android 7.1.1 and we are up to Android 11 now. KVM path you need more cpu cores and more memory than a pinephone is going to have.

Android-x86 has the limitations of being short on resources to stay with current versions of Android as well.

With the pinephone hardware limitations the best option if you need Android applications is in fact dual boot run Android and what ever OS you want for desktop as two different OS installs.

Once you get to 8G of ram and 8 full cores you have enough to be able to VM well.

Remember more Linux desktop users are likely to use a Windows application than a Android one. Until we get a larger population of Linux desktop based mobile phones out there with more processor and ram power integrated support for Android applications is not going be there because there just is not the resources in the devices to-do it.

Once we have the phones out there with the hardware there will be more users wanting the android application support so hopefully more developers for projects like anbox.

The hard bits of the hardware and the base OS rough edges they need to be fixed before Android application support. Once that is fixed there are quite a few different options from commercial products to virtual machine options to containers for running Android applications.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/07/glodroid-android-for-pinephone-allwinner

Different groups are working in the means to run Android as primary OS on pinephone items this is why dual boot is option for this generation of pinephone hardware.

It a wacky one right. Not supporting Android at this time in the OS is not a deal breaker. Its really simple to forgot pinephone and items like it are built from the ground up to be running more than 1 OS. That means if you need android support you can just run Android once you have done what you need in android reboot and go into plasma mobile or some other Linux desktop based OS for mobile. Yes that other OS can allow you todo things that you cannot do well under Android as well.

Things get hard and expensive in hardware requirements when you wish to run both at the same time. This was also true when we only had 2-4 cores in desktop computers.

[Quackdoc]

Anbox issues I will give it has quite a few. Particularly that it stuck on Android 7.1.1 and we are up to Android 11 now. KVM path you need more cpu cores and more memory than a pinephone is going to have.

Android-x86 has the limitations of being short on resources to stay with current versions of Android as well.

With the pinephone hardware limitations the best option if you need Android applications is in fact dual boot run Android and what ever OS you want for desktop as two different OS installs.

Once you get to 8G of ram and 8 full cores you have enough to be able to VM well.

Remember more Linux desktop users are likely to use a Windows application than a Android one. Until we get a larger population of Linux desktop based mobile phones out there with more processor and ram power integrated support for Android applications is not going be there because there just is not the resources in the devices to-do it.

Once we have the phones out there with the hardware there will be more users wanting the android application support so hopefully more developers for projects like anbox.

The hard bits of the hardware and the base OS rough edges they need to be fixed before Android application support. Once that is fixed there are quite a few different options from commercial products to virtual machine options to containers for running Android applications.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/07/glodroid-android-for-pinephone-allwinner

Different groups are working in the means to run Android as primary OS on pinephone items this is why dual boot is option for this generation of pinephone hardware.

It a wacky one right. Not supporting Android at this time in the OS is not a deal breaker. Its really simple to forgot pinephone and items like it are built from the ground up to be running more than 1 OS. That means if you need android support you can just run Android once you have done what you need in android reboot and go into plasma mobile or some other Linux desktop based OS for mobile. Yes that other OS can allow you todo things that you cannot do well under Android as well.

Things get hard and expensive in hardware requirements when you wish to run both at the same time. This was also true when we only had 2-4 cores in desktop computers.

yeah it is a fairly big issue that needs to be tackled though, just because there is no good solution now thankfully doesn't mean there won't be one in the future.

[oiaohm]

yeah it is a fairly big issue that needs to be tackled though, just because there is no good solution now thankfully doesn't mean there won't be one in the future.

The big problem is all the possible solutions to the problem need more processing power than the pinephone like devices will have. To tackle the problem you need users and developers. You will not get either without the hardware platform.

So its a problem that is a future problem to fully solve when we have more powerful phones that can run the Linux desktop OS taken to phone..

[stiiixy]

PinePhone aside, which seems to be the dev device of choice to get an actual working phone with real apps now, I'm excited for the project's future.

It has been a long time coming and it's very much appreciated the effort expended to get this far.

And Manjaro have been working with it as well (my favouritest full-blown desktop 😃) so, bonus!