KDE Plasma Mobile is dropping Halium

Fla

I understand the need to focus the few human resources on the shell itself but that means almost no community so a few feedback, and a limited visibility... That feels like a very risky move to me.

What do you think? What is the impact for UT? I understand that the Plasma Mobile wasn't contributing to Halium a lot so maybe not a big loss?

kugiigi

@fla I don't think they really have a userbase on android-based devices anyway. Plasma Mobile has existed for a long time and from what I see, it has only really had progress since the Pinephone existed. I think this is a good decision for them. And I don't think UT should be affected by this nor try to do the same.

makeixo

@fla said in KDE Plasma Mobile is dropping Halium:

That feels like a very risky move to me.

Maybe they know something we don't. I didn't read the announcement but a Golem-article that they drop halium, which isn't maybe the worst idea, when you just have limited resources. Most likely it will come down if manufacturers like Pine64 can build a costumer model.
Does it need a SD 888, 2485 GB ram and a 123848 mpx camera? I don't think so. Do you care how much ram your device has, when the OS runs smooth? I have a Xperia Xx with SFOS, which runs quite smooth, as daily driver. When I updated from SFOS 2 to SFOS 3 I was impressed, how much faster/smoother it got.
That showed me how much you can achieve just by optimizing your software. This week I have heard that several Pixel devices share the same camera (sensor?). They just optimized the software.

Therefore, maybe it isn't a bad idea to focus on their own software instead of building every year a new halium layer to support Android devices.

flohack

@fla No impact for us, in short, just less helping hands, but UT was(is the only project that really invests in Halium. What is saddening me though is that also other OSes we once had in mind did not contribute in any effort to bring Halium forward, like Nemo mobile, Postmarket etc. If UT continues to be the only contributor then we might take over the repositories and just maintain it inside UBports.

poVoq

@flohack Wasn't Halium originally a SailfishOS project? They also stopped contributing?

flohack

@povoq I cannot see much coming from their side, so even if it was their origin there is no much contribution now. If you are interested maybe you could drop them a line

Fla

@flohack yes that's sad. On the other side Postmarket always said that their goal is to run vanilla Linux (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Mainlining) so I'm not surprised they are putting their resources there and not on Halium.