KDE Plasma Mobile Drops Halium Support In Favor Of Open Devices

Project Halium for the past several years has allowed various Linux distributions to build atop the likes of libhybris and other abstractions for running on hardware with Android pre-installed. This abstraction layer has been popular from KDE Plasma Mobile to UBports to Sailfish OS while now Plasma Mobile is discontinuing their support.

Due to the headaches involved in maintaining Halium-based device support and in recent years some smartphones seeing mainline Linux kernel support, KDE Plasma Mobile is dropping support for Halium devices.

Thanks to the likes of the Pine64 PinePhone and Purism Librem 5 smartphones that are open-source minded and seeing mainline kernel work plus various other SoCs and smartphones seeing mainline kernel support thanks to the community, it's in the interest of Plasma Mobile developers to drop this Halium support that caters to Android binary blobs and often has other headaches involved in managing the various aspects of the system.

KDE Plasma Mobile developers announced their decision today to drop this Halium device support within Plasma Mobile. Users are encouraged to upgrade to one of these more open-minded devices either the PinePhone, Librem 5, or numerous community-ported devices that can run on the mainline kernel.

The folks with postmarketOS have a Wiki page outlining the mainline status for various SoCs and other mainline kernel work being achieved.