Two methods are provided for installing Plasma Mobile

Feb 13, 2018 21:00 GMT  ·  By

After announcing a few weeks ago the availability of a dedicated image for installing and running Plasma Mobile on PCs and virtual machines, KDE now posted info on how to install it on a mobile phone.

If you want to try something new on your Android smartphone, the KDE Project provides the community with not one but two methods for installing its Plasma Mobile, a full-featured software system for mobile devices.

The first method uses postmarketOS, a pre-configured Alpine Linux-based GNU/Linux distribution optimized for touchscreens and designed to offer KDE's Plasma Mobile as a choice of desktop environment/user interface on top of the Wayland display server.

The advantage of the postmarketOS method is that it offers Plasma Mobile for Android smartphones running the mainline kernel, including LG Nexus 5, Sony's Xperia Z2 tablet, and Google Nexus 7 (2013) tablet. On the downside, it's still in early stages of development and not recommended to end users.

Installing Plasma Mobile with Halium and a KDE Neon-based rootfs

The second method, recommended to most end users, involves installing Halium (HAL for mobile Linux OSes), which provides a minimal Android layer to allow Plasma Mobile to communicate with the underlying Android kernel to access the device's hardware.

On top of that, the Plasma Mobile team recommends using a rootfs based on the KDE Neon distribution. You can find Halium-based Plasma Mobile binary images for LG Nexus 5 and Nexus 5X smartphones on KDE Project's download server.

For more information on how to install Plasma Mobile on your Android-based mobile device check out this article, which includes all the documentation and links to files you need to download. The video below shows Plasma Mobile running on the Sony Xperia Z2 tablet.