Bhushan Shah - Plasma on Mobile Devices - Akademy 2018
Channel: The KDE Community
Date: 2018-09-05

KDE community have been working on Plasma Mobile with a goal of having open echosystem for Mobile devices. However the road to that goal has been very limited due to closed devices. While project halium has been helping us on that road, however what project halium is doing is essentially a workaround for the far bigger problem.

Mobile devices in market come with very old kernel and android software pre-installed. These softwares are generally not patched against the already discovered security vulnerabilities. While Plasma Mobile can work with such old stack using the hacks like libhybris, it doesn't help us achieve the goal of privacy and security.

The solution is to bring the support for these devices in the mainline kernel. This provides us with the up-to-date base system to work on (Linux 4.1x, Mesa graphics, DRM, Wayland) and we can avoid dealing with the binary blobs through halium/libhybris. Plasma Mobile community is recently working with the kernel developers to bring support for older phones like Nexus 5 to mailine kernel. (see links for details).

This talk includes some more technical details about the open devices and how Plasma Mobile works on such devices and what's next for Plasma Mobile project given such nice opportunity.

Speaker: Bhushan Shah