14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Project continues to improve the Plasma Mobile UI for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices and released today an ISO image for the community to test on their machines.
Last week, KDE pledged to make 2018 the year its Plasma Mobile user interface for mobile devices becomes fully a functional mobile environment and deploy it on as many devices as possible, including the upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone from Purism, which should be available in Q1 2019.
But they need community's help to test Plasma Mobile on their devices or virtual machines and report issues they might discover. As such, KDE released today the first-ever dedicated Plasma Mobile ISO image that users can download and boot on real machines or virtual ones like QEMU/KVM or Oracle's VirtualBox.
"Testing this on virtual machine was quite a hack earlier," said Bhushan Shah. "We had no dedicated ISO image for Plasma Mobile, to test the Plasma Mobile one had to install KDE Neon developer edition and then run a few commands to convert it to a Plasma Mobile installation."
Here's how to test Plasma Mobile and what you need to test
To test the Plasma Mobile UI right now, all you have to do is to download the dedicated ISO image (link above), and either boot it directly on a virtual machine (QEMU/KVM and VirtualBox virtualization software are currently supported) or write it on a USB flash drive and boot it on your personal computer.
Once you managed to run Plasma Mobile, the KDE Project would like you to test a few things, such as to try to add a widget to the desktop, read comics in the Peruse app, test the Kaidan XMPP client, as well as to download and install an app from the Plasma Discover Software Center.
Feedback can be sent to the [email protected] mailing list, the #plasma IRC channel on Freenode, the #plasmamobile:matrix.org matrix room, or the Plasma Mobile Telegram group. Please keep in mind that Plasma Mobile is still in Alpha stages of development and some functionality may not work as expected.
Soon, the KDE Project will announce new images of Plasma Mobile that can be tested on real mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, instead of computers and virtual machines. Stay tuned, and check out the gallery below to see Plasma Mobile in action and screenshots of what you need to test.
