Plasma Active: So far, so adequate
Ever since Plasma Active was released in 2012, I’ve been waiting for KDE to release another desktop environment for mobile devices. Last week, that wait was finally over with the first alpha release of Plasma Mobile, Active’s successor. However, delay may have raised my expectations too high. While Mobile was full of innovations, so far, Active is simply another desktop for phones or tablets, appearing little different from what I currently have on my Android devices. Its main interest is the applications it includes, which seems to indicate Plasma Active’s design priorities.
What made Plasma Active such a standout was its innovations. It was KDE with a different desktop environment — a proof of concept of KDE 4’s arrangement of the desktop as a sub-system that could be swapped out for another with relative ease. Even more importantly, it innovated. Like Ubuntu Touch — which I suspect it inspired — Plasma Active worked by the user swiping from the sides of the screen. It also included an OsS X-like spinner rack for changing Activities, a widget so efficient that I wished that standard Plasma would include it, too. As I wrote at the time, it was the first desktop for mobile devices that did not feel like a clumsy makeshift, and could even work well on a laptop or workstation. Unfortunately, however, Plasma Active never made it on to any shipped devices.
By contrast, Plasma Mobile has already received publicity, thanks to the announcement that Purism’s free and secure phone the Librem 5 would include it as one of the available desktop environments. That announcement may have hastened the release of the alpha, perhaps pushing it out prematurely, since there is very little that you can actually do with Plasma Mobile when you install it on a virtual machine. Click any of the icons — at least in my experience — and most of the time you get a flickering or frozen screen, forcing you to shut it down and reboot. So far, only the Setting icon works reliably.
Still, like Plasma Active, Plasma Mobile does show off the efficiency of the KDE environment, providing what by my count is the third alternative to standard Plasma (the other, for those keeping count, was Plasma Netbook, yet another desktop since faded into obscurity). Beneath it is the familiar KDE; the command line, for example, is Konsole.
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