PinePhone will default to Manjaro with KDE Plasma Mobile

Several days ago the news was released that the Pine64 community has decided to use the default firmware on smartphones pinephone based on the distribution of Manjaro and the KDE Plasma Mobile user environment.

And is that in early February, the Pine64 project abandoned the formation of separate editions of PinePhone Community Edition in favor of developing PinePhone as a total platform that offers a basic reference environment by default and provides the ability to quickly install alternatives.

Alternative firmware developed for PinePhone can be installed or downloaded from an SD card as an option.

For example, in addition to Manjaro, boot images based on postmarketOS, KDE Plasma Mobile, UBports, Maemo Leste, Manjaro, LuneOS, Nemo Mobile, a partially open platform Sailfish, and OpenMandriva are being developed.

Building builds based on NixOS, openSUSE, DanctNIX, and Fedora are discussed. To support alternative firmware developers, it was proposed to sell stylized back covers for each firmware with the logo of different projects in the online Pine Store. The cost of the cover will be $ 15, of which $ 10 will be transferred to the firmware developers in the form of a donation.

Note that the choice of the default environment was made with the cooperation in mind long and well tested of the PINE64 project with the Manjaro and KDE communities.

Also, at one point it was the Plasma Mobile shell that inspired PINE64 to create their phone. smart Linux.

Recently, the development of Plasma Mobile has made significant progress and this shell is already quite suitable for everyday use. Regarding Manjaro distribution, its developers are key project partners and provide support for all PINE64 devices, including ROCKPro64 boards and Pinebook Pro laptop.

The developers of Manjaro have made a great contribution to firmware development for PinePhone, and the images they have prepared are some of the best and most functional.

The Manjaro distribution is based on the Arch Linux package foundation and uses its own BoxIt toolkit, modeled after Git.

The repository is supported on an ongoing basis, but new versions go through an additional stabilization stage. The KDE Plasma Mobile user environment is based on the Plasma 5 mobile desktop, the KDE Frameworks 5 libraries, the Ofono phone stack, and the Telepathy communications framework.

To create the application interface, Qt is used, a set of Mauikit components and the Kirigamide KDE Frameworks, allowing you to create universal interfaces suitable for smartphones, tablets, and PCs. The kwin_wayland composite server is used to display graphics. PulseAudio is used for sound processing.

The structure includes applications like KDE Connect to pair your phone with a desktop, Okular Document Viewer, VVave Music Player, Image Viewers, Koko and Pix, Buho System Reference Notes, Calindori Calendar Planner, File Manager the Index, Discover App Manager, the program for sending SMS space bar, the plasma agenda, among others.

Also, among PinePhone related events, the launch of the production of a folding keyboard accessory is also mentioned. The keyboard is connected by replacing the back cover. 

Currently, the first batch of keyboards has already been released, But the overlay keys are not ready yet as another manufacturer is responsible for their manufacture. To balance the weight, an additional 6000 mAh battery is planned to be incorporated into the keyboard. In addition, a full USB-C port will appear on the keyboard unit, through which you can connect, for example, a mouse.

As well It is mentioned that work is being done to open the code of the components of the telephone battery, transfer drivers for the modem to the main Linux kernel, and improve the handling of incoming calls and messages when the device is in sleep mode.

The modem already supports loading an unmodified Linux 5.11 kernel, but the functionality with the new kernel is still limited to support for serial, USB and NAND. 

Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it about the note, you can check the following link.


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