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by shmerl 3073 days ago
> Would love to see OSes based on KDE Mobile or whatever it is called these days.

Purism said, they are working with KDE developers to support Plasma Mobile on Librem 5.

I wish though Plasma Mobile would get rid of those archaic on screen buttons, and would adopt SailfishOS style swipes navigation. Or at least they should make that an option. KDE is after all well known for customization.

1 comments

> I wish though Plasma Mobile would get rid of those archaic on screen buttons, and would adopt SailfishOS style swipes navigation. Or at least they should make that an option. KDE is after all well known for customization.

I wish they won't, as it's hard to get right. In my personal opinion the Sailfish swipe UI was one of the probable reasons it failed in the market -- it was hard to explore, and error-prone to use.

Meanwhile the N9 swipes felt just right to me, so I think it's about having enough UX expertise at the design team. Which open source projects famously are short of.

Things are different now, though. The release of iPhone X has finally made such UI gestures mainstream.
Make it configurable, so users would be able to assign actions to any swipe and gesture. That should allow customizing it to your needs any way you want.
That works for technically oriented people, so maybe in this case it'd be fine. But in general configurations are avoided in end-user applications for a good reason, as they increase complexity both for developers and users.
KDE is famous for configurability while providing useful defaults at the same time. So it's only fitting.