14 DAY TRIAL // KDE contributor Bhushan Shah recently showcased a modified version of the Plasma Mobile operating system, based on Google's Android 6.0 OS, on the LG Nexus 5X smartphone.
We all know that KDE's Plasma Mobile operating system is still in the works and nowhere near becoming mainstream anytime soon, or even shipping on some no-name device. In its current development state, the mobile OS appears to be functional on a very small number of devices, including the popular Nexus 5 and One Plus One.
According to Mr. Shah, these smartphones are using the older Android 5.0 or CyanogenMod 12 mobile operating systems as their base. But for Plasma Mobile to work on newer devices powered by Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) or later versions, it requires the upstream libhybris library component to get a major update.
"Current libhybris upstream doesn’t have support for the devices running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), however there are two different forks of libhybris which are proposed to be merged into upstream libhybris and supports the Android 6.0," said Bhushan Shah. "This allows one to use Android 6.0 based binaries on normal Linux userspace."
More devices could soon be supported by Plasma Mobile
Being brave enough to make his Nexus 5X a testbed for trying Android 6.0-based Plasma Mobile, the developer modified the mobile operating system to use those libhybris forks, as well as a custom version of the KWin window manager with support for HWcomposer 1.4 and 1.5. And as you can see from the gallery below, it works!
For now, only graphics and input are supported on Nexus 5X, but Mr. Shah plans on making other components work as well, including network and GSM. However, the most important thing here is that this work opens the door for Plasma Mobile to run on newer devices, but not without the contributions from the KDE community.
