Convergence

Among the many criticisms levelled at Gnome 3 and Unity, the most uttered is that these desktop environments force upon their users an interface that looks like it belongs on a touchscreen. Certainly both of these desktops have at least reasonable touchscreen support (both support multitouch gestures), but users actually making regular use of it are very much in the minority.

Plasma 5 also has reasonable touchscreen support, but it’s immediately apparent that, at least it’s default state, it has been designed to serve under traditional mouse and keyboard rule. Both Windows and Ubuntu have much to say on convergence – the idea that you can take your phone running the respective OS, plug in a display and some peripherals, and then will occur a strange prestidigitation wherein the OS will transform to make use of the extra hardware.

Plasma 5 will eventually support convergence, but not at the expense of the traditional desktop experience. A great deal of work went into the development of Plasma Active, a mobile interface based on KDE 4, and efforts to port this to Plasma 5 are underway, with the project now being called Plasma Mobile. This project is, in fact, heavily allied with Kubuntu. For what it’s worth, neither Windows 10 Mobile nor Ubuntu Touch are particularly polished, and until these mobile platforms are ready, any talk of convergence is, for practical purposes, largely moot.