Hi everyone!
I tried reviewing this before, in this post. It didn’t go too well XD. This time, I’m reviewing KDE Plasma Mobile properly with QEMU (it doesn’t play nicely with virtualbox). I still used the NVIDIA GPU, because I’m stupid, hence the black screens, but you can just ignore those – I confirmed they don’t happen with integrated Intel or Radeon graphics. This time I’m reviewing the 2018/03/06 build, which seems to have fixed a few problems.
KDE Plasma Mobile on QEMU: The video review
Installation
Hmm. Didn’t really work, we got some wayland-related error. But this is an alpha, and they don’t seem to say we should install it, so yeah, never mind.
Software Manager
Nice visually appealing design, but a little glitchy with the scroll wheel. Not really an issue, because use the mouse to simulate sliding across the screen to scroll, like you would on a phone/tablet, works just fine. I can now install apps (or would be able to if I installed it and set a user password), and it looks nice and intuitive. It does show desktop apps too, which in my experience work well with the KDE plasma mobile interface. Shame I didn’t show it in the video, but Firefox integrates nicely with plasma mobile.
Customisation
Not as much as usual out of the box for a Linux distro, but this is alpha. At the moment, you can adjust things like screen timeout, and font size, and it comes with a nice selection of themes, all of which look nice and seem to work well. What other mobile OS comes with themes out of the box? I reckon this will be a much-liked feature for users.
Default Apps
It comes with a few of these. It has a maps app, as well as VLC, vPlayer (another media player), a comic book viewer, and an XMPP client, amongst other things. I believe XMPP is for integrating with Facebook but correct if I’m wrong :).
KDE Plasma Mobile on QEMU: A Summary
While it has a few bugs, it’s not bad for an alpha. As I mentioned in the video, it does tend to black screen on NVIDIA cards (at least with the NVIDIA drivers), but NVIDIA cards have always been a pain in the backside with Linux in my experience anyway. It has a fair number of nice features, including a few I didn’t touch upon like the desktop widgets, and generally looks very visually appealing and professional. I’ve been following this project excitedly for a while now, so I’m glad to see a release. I’ll be testing it again when they release the second alpha/beta/a major new build. If you want me to cover new versions of this in videos or blog posts, let me know in the comments section :). As mentioned in the video, I want to have the PXE stuff done soon. It’s tricky to find the time, it being a much more complex topic, but I will try to get it done in the next few weeks at least. Anyways, that’s it from me for now, so I’ll see you soon with a new post.
Hamish