Fosdem and Plasma Mobile Sprint

BlaBlaSoftware

From January 31st to February 8th I went on a little tour, first at the two days of Fosdem in Brussels, then to Berlin for a KDE sprint about Plasma Mobile.

It was the first time i went to Fodem: it’s an awesome experience, even tough big and messy: which is the awesome of it… and the bad of it at the same time 🙂

Even tough there were 800 talks I didn’t attend that many, some about the Elixir language, some about retrocomputing, some about iot stuff. At Fosdem the best thing to do there.. is meeting a lot of interesting people, rather than attending talks, which are very interesting never the less, which you can find videos here.

I stayed most of the time at the KDE booth. in there we had as usual some hardware to show: besides the usual occasional “normal” laptops running Plasma, we had a PineBook pro running Plasma on Manjaro which runs impressively well for such a low resource machine and was in fact a favorite among the visitors.

Yep, there were a lot of people.

Besides that we had some Pinephones running Plasma Mobile, which they were very popular as well. The Plasma Mobile shell was very stable compared to last year fosdem which made me quite happy.

Looking people using it for the first time, was also a very precious feedback on what are the UI problems new users can encounter.

Feedback that turned out to be very useful the next week, when together other people working on Plasma Mobile and two perople from the UBports project few to Berlin for a Plasma Mobile sprint, graciously hosted by KDAB in their spaces.

There will be many points we will be able to collaborate with UBPorts, starting from background technology such as their telephony services, the content sharing infrastructure, and maybe push notifications. Tough in the end, we want their apps running smoothly on Plasma Mobile and our apps running smoothly on UBports as well, to have as many apps as possible.

Personally, the areas that i worked more at the sprint were the Plasma Mobile homescreen and fixes in Kirigami that were needed for some plasma mobile apps to look better.

On the Plasma Mobile homescreen, now dragging plasmoid thumbnails from the widget explorer to the homescreen works properly (fix in KWin, also drag and drop icons in your desktop wayland session should be fine now)

Plasma Mobile, Clean homescreen look

In order to make the homescreen look a bit more “modern” and less busy, I also removed most of the gray background rectangles that were there and in general simplified the homescreen code a bit, here is the result:

In general, it seems to me that Plasma Mobile is actually really start coming together 🙂

7 thoughts on “Fosdem and Plasma Mobile Sprint

  1. Pingback: KDE's Plasma Mobile Is Shaping Nicely on the PinePhone - 9to5Linux

  2. Pingback: Plasma Mobile comienza a tomar forma, pero el camino será largo

  3. paul

    Given that plasma mobile is a project going on since 2009, it would be nice to write a blog post to summarize the challenges you did overcome in all those years; otherwise people will read your final comment – it seems to me that Plasma Mobile is actually really start coming together – and say “well, it only took 10 years to have something usable…”

    Reply
  4. Pingback: Resumen del Plasma Mobile Sprint 2020 de Berlín - KDE Blog

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