14 DAY TRIAL // KDE announced today that it's partnering with Purism, a company known for manufacturing high-quality, privacy-focused laptops, to work on what it would appear to be world's first truly free smartphone device powered by Linux.
As you may be aware, KDE develops the Plasma Mobile environment for tablets and smartphones, besides the Plasma desktop environment that you're probably using right now on your personal computer.
Purism recently launched a crowdfunding campaign for a new Linux smartphone that they call Librem 5, and it looks like they'll be working with the KDE team to build the first fully free and open source smartphone using Plasma Mobile.
"Building a Free Software and privacy-focused smartphone has been a dream of the KDE community for a long time. We created Plasma to not just run on desktops and laptops, but for the whole spectrum of devices," says Lydia Pintscher, President of KDE e.V..
"Partnering with Purism will allow us to ready Plasma Mobile for the real world and integrate it seamlessly with a commercial device for the first time. The Librem 5 will make Plasma Mobile shine the way it deserves."
KDE's Lydia Pintscher also added that today's partnership is a dream come true for the KDE community, which will have full, unrestricted access to Purism's hardware platform, allowing them to integrate the Plasma Mobile graphical environment for mobile devices for the first time on a commercial device.
Will you buy the Librem 5 smartphone?
Having a truly free, open source and privacy-oriented device on our hands sounds good to us, but looking at what happened to Canonical's Ubuntu Phone and Convergence vision, we have our doubts that KDE and Purism will manage to make a profitable smartphone business.
The market is already saturated with numerous Android devices, which are also powered by Linux, as well as the iPhone, which is very popular in many parts of the world, so We have to be realistic and ask ourselves "who will buy the Librem 5 smartphone running KDE Plasma Mobile?" If yes, check out Purism's crowdfunding campaign.