KDE Plasma Mobile Is Beginning To Look Surprisingly Good

[Hans Bull]

Love it, and hope to see it ASAP on a Pinephone!

[jospoortvliet]

I love KDE but they really have mixed tastes. I like a lot breeze dark and most of the desktop apps, but the whole of kirigami looks like a badly dated implementation of material design concepts (without the style) with unnecessary changes (like their hamburger menu being on the bottom left instead of top, just because).

actually not "Just because" but because it is smart to put navigation items on the bottom, like Nokia Meego also did - it is easier to reach. The habit of putting things o top in Andriod is pretty problematic now smartphones get bigger and higher.

Google will introduce an address bar on the bottom in chrome, same with hamburger menus, I guess. Actually there is already an experimental setting for chrome on mobile.

you can dislike the looks but the usability had a fair amount of thought put into it.

[nuetzel]

That said, am I the only one that finds the Breeze icons (the black and white flat icons in KDE and Libreoffice, and now in the Plasma Mobile) both ugly and unusable? Fortunately, they are easily changed to Oxygen.

'Modern' is the 'old' in the future...
We're looking 3D not flat. (A knob is knob.)- You're not alone.

[mikelpr]

actually not "Just because" but because it is smart to put navigation items on the bottom, like Nokia Meego also did - it is easier to reach. The habit of putting things o top in Andriod is pretty problematic now smartphones get bigger and higher.

Google will introduce an address bar on the bottom in chrome, same with hamburger menus, I guess. Actually there is already an experimental setting for chrome on mobile.

you can dislike the looks but the usability had a fair amount of thought put into it.

ah, I get the bottom nav being easier to reach and hadn't thought it would be because of that hehe. a nice alternative to google's recent bottom nav tabbar madness
but in general it has a weird gingerbread vibe as someone else mentioned

look at this screen from the kirigami page, what were they thinking with that kind of header! The Dive list text has no padding, uses a light font yet it's small
also the FAB, its little friend (why is it bottom aligned tho), and the hamburger toggle don't cast a satisfying shadow and makes it seem cluttered blending with the list

[jospoortvliet]

ah, I get the bottom nav being easier to reach and hadn't thought it would be because of that hehe. a nice alternative to google's recent bottom nav tabbar madness
but in general it has a weird gingerbread vibe as someone else mentioned

look at this screen from the kirigami page, what were they thinking with that kind of header! The Dive list text has no padding, uses a light font yet it's small
also the FAB, its little friend (why is it bottom aligned tho), and the hamburger toggle don't cast a satisfying shadow and makes it seem cluttered blending with the list

Well there's still lots to fix, no doubt about it. I'm not liking it too much, to be honest, and I'm not sure what future it really has, but can't fault the KDE folks for trying. The way Qt and the Linux app ecosystem are going now, they'll be even more irrelevant a decade or two from now, so something has to change and who knows, this might be it. As all GTK based attempts at mobile UI's have been (epic) failures and the Qt ones been quite OK (if it wasn't for Elop I still think the N9 would've changed the industry) at least there is potential.