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Presentation: Plasma for embedded devices

KDE technologies on "totally not a desktop" devices

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Plasma is not only Desktop, as shown by our effort in Plasma Mobile project, but we can go even further than that.

The talk will make the case that Plasma and other KDE technologies are ready for embedded development on single-purpose ARM devices, analyzing real world use cases, both from an UI and hardware adaptation standpoints.
The talk will analyse Plasma Mobile and a voice assistant device, built with Mycroft and Plasma Shell as its sole UI.

Deploying Plasma on such devices have multiple challenges, Bhushan Will talk about them and solutions offered by KDE community. Marco will talk about how is possible to have a completely different plasma based user interface which even tough sharing the same runtime of Plasma Desktop, doesn't retain any Desktop-specific user interface.

Plasma is developed with multiple form-factors in mind, be it Plasma Media Center or Plasma Mobile or Smart Speakers. However most of these devices are not made with Linux distribution in mind, and lot of work goes in building a Linux distribution tailored for devices like this, and making sure KDE technology is compatible with these devices.

Bhushan will talk about hardware enablement, challenges including but not limited to graphics stacks, kernel and/or hardware limitations. He will also talk about various solutions offered by KDE community to build and deploy Linux distribution with KDE technologies to such device.

Marco will present 2 brand new Plasma shells: the one developed for the Mycroft Mark-II voice assistant, and one written for tablet devices where voice interaction is a first-class citizen, again using Mycroft for voice interaction (think about the big Alexa Echo Show).

The talk will go on describing concepts like:

* Plasma Shell Package
* Plasma Look and Feel package
* Containment
* Plasmoid
* QtQuickcontrols2 and styling
* Devices with "apps" and devices without

It will be described how all of those concepts play together and how to replicate.

Our hope is to spark creativity and see a flourishing ecosystem of Plasma adaptations potentially on every device with a screen.

Info

Day: 2019-09-07
Start time: 14:35
Duration: 00:30
Room: U4-08
Track: Applications

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