Librem 5 Smartphone Now Plans To Ship With KDE Plasma

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Librem 5 Smartphone Now Plans To Ship With KDE Plasma, Abandoning GNOME

There's a big shift in course for Purism's proposed Librem 5 smartphone, what was originally proposed as a GNU/Linux smartphone running GNOME and HTML5 Web Apps. It's parting ways with their GNOME plans and instead plans to use KDE Plasma Mobile...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Librem-5-Goes-KDE

[darkbasic]

I would be tempted to back this project since it now targets Plasma, but such a sudden change of route makes me think that they have no vision for their project. Is there someone from the KDE community who is involved with this? Can you please share your thoughts?

[prazola]

Now the project becomes interesting.

[Nille_kungen]

This makes a lot more sense then the original plan.
Going with KDE plasma and Qt makes this project more plausible.
I think they realized that the old plan wasn't possible with the small resources and given timeframe.
Now they can use work that is already done instead of the NIH from earlier plan.

[eggbert]

I would be tempted to back this project since it now targets Plasma, but such a sudden change of route makes me think that they have no vision for their project. Is there someone from the KDE community who is involved with this? Can you please share your thoughts?

I was thinking the exact same thing. Sounds like they bit off more than they can chew.

[jukk]

I think times are beginning to change. As also reported by LWN from the Open Source Summit (paywalled article https://lwn.net/Articles/733463/), people are working towards enabling Android to run on mainline kernel graphics stack (even Google is reportedly interested). The Purism phone has partly the same goal. If chip makers would create drivers for the mainline kernel, we would see much more projects like these. The Android fork of the Linux kernel has prevented a lot. Security fixes, maintenance, innovation, development and collaboration, upstream sharing has been almost absent in the Android world. Every Android device that is spit out from the factory line is like a frozen piece of hardware brick in history, whereas the Linux kernel and software used in GNU Linux distributions are constantly evolving and innovating, spreading their efforts downstream to all kinds of systems. Sure, it could work this way forever, why not (it is open source after all), but I think people are beginning to see the usefulness of creating drivers and software in such a way that sharing things upstream is possible.

[Termy]

if i would be willing to pay 600 bucks for a phone, i now would be REALLY tempted to back them. Really looking forward to Plasma mobile being ready for daily use

[rabcor]

I'm so sick of google and never even liked apple, gib dis fon plz.

Also who cares if they have no vision, as long as they ship the damn thing we can figure out the rest like we always do! Replacing ubuntu with arch and so on.

[Mavman]

In before _

That's not the standard desktop!!!

(I couldn't resist) :P

[schmidtbag]

I sure am glad I didn't invest in this phone. Though I prefer KDE over Gnome, I wouldn't want to be a backer to something, only to find they changed a major part of the UI as a last-minute decision. Seems like it could be a turn-off to those who wanted it because of gnome, while also showing commitment issues.