After testing Plasma Mobile packages on Fedora 40 and KDE Neon 6.2, It would be nice to have these packages pre installed in Bazzite, this GUI has improved with each release of Plasma and makes a lot of sense on smaller touchscreen devices.
You could just leave it to the user to select which GUI to load via SDDM or you could maybe have a simple script/command to run in ujust for switching environments?
I run Fedora with Plasma Mobile on a Dell 2 in 1 Tablet and it works really well as a touch first device, and if I want a full desktop, I can logout, select Plasma DE and log back in, I also have KDE Neon on another Dell Laptop convertible, and it works equally as good, horses for courses I say.
I feel Plasma Mobile would work really nice on the Legion Go, and should also work really well on the Steam Deck and similar handhelds, so maybe it could be added to the Deck images first?
If anyone else has any thoughts on this, post below, but I really think this would work well with console handhelds.
You can add it via rpm ostree directly if you’d like. Otherwise, I can walk you through creating an image with blue-build and you can rebase onto that it.
Nice work, if I get some time I will give this a go, I might test this on spare Dell Tablet PC first and I’ll see how I go, I really like Plasma Mobile on touch style device, gives it a more Android or ChromeOS feel.
I installed the plasma-mobile package on my tablet using the Bazzite-DX image. It has some bugs.
First major one is that I can’t bring up a virtual keyboard. maliit-keyboard does not seem to run properly and I have not been able to bring up other virtual keyboards. I would use the Steam keyboard, but I don’t know how to bring it up without pressing buttons on a controller; when I flip this 2-in-1 into tablet only mode, I don’t have access to the physical keyboard or a controller.
The theme gets set improperly. I was only able to change it to dark mode when it was going through the tour and since I switched to Game mode and Plasma, it went back to light when I logged back into Plasma Mobile. I can’t seem to get it back to dark mode.
The screen locked and asked for my PIN and would only show numbers. What it really wanted was my password.
Overall, I would not recommend using Plasma Mobile as an add-in package. Maybe someday someone will build a dedicated image of Bazzite/DX with Plasma Mobile that is working correctly. I don’t know enough to do it myself at the moment.
Yes this is all pretty normal on most disto’s with Plasma-Mobile at the moment, its pretty much a dogs breakfast, I’ve tried to run it a number of times now, there is a Fedora Spin that works pretty good, but still has more bugs than a motel that charges by the hour.
There is a button you can enable in Plasma Mobile to manually invoke the keyboard, not sure if that works in this version, but it does work on other distro’s.
The whole touch keyboard thing is a total mess under Linux with Wayland, I drive a detachable every day, and really only Fedora KDE works properly, Plasma Mobile is hit or miss, Bazzite is not usable, all because of the onscreen keyboard, and even in Fedora KDE, Maliit keyboard is the only option, and it’s not great compared to any other OS (ChromiumOS/Windows/Android) that uses an onscreen keyboard, it has no arrow or function keys, no advance mode, no way to configure it.
Plasma-Mobile needs some serious work in order to be usable period, I feel like its not getting the love it needs or deserves, maybe it will improve, but I feel like KDE just want it to go away
