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Another week, another attempt to dent Android and iOS emanating from the open source community. This one, however, may be taken more seriously than most, as it comes from the KDE project, one of the most popular Linux desktops on PCs.

KDE has unveiled the first full release of its Plasma Active system, and it is not trying where RIM and Palm are failing, with a full operating system. Instead, it is harnessing its traditional strengths and following the trend to create innovative user interfaces which carry most of the functionality, and run on stripped-down Linux OS engines. Plasma Active borrows many of the features of its grown-up cousin, KDE 4.x, but has controls and APIs designed for touchscreens.

The project may not be attempting an Android me-too, but it does see the two leading mobile OSs as its target. Sebastian Kügler, one of Plasma Active's leading developers, told ZDnet that Plasma Active was "certainly meant as a replacement for iOS and Android, a completely open, community driven project with strong backing by a group of businesses. We hope this appeals to many hardware vendors, and have in fact already started talking with some. The feedback so far was very good, and the concepts seem to appeal with potential partners. There is definitely demand for an open system without lock-in in the market for devices."

Of course, the idea of getting wide support with the promise of freedom from one vendor's chains has been tried before, and unsuccessfully - by SavaJe, LiMO and most recently, Tizen (the merger of LiMO with Intel's MeeGo). Indeed, Kügler said KDE was investigating Tizen, as well as using MeeGo for its first release, though he said the new platform as yet had "too many unknowns … before Intel and Samsung release an SDK, our hands are tied." But the shift towards the cloud/browser experience and HTML5 will start to reduce the importance of individual 'fat' OSs, so KDE may have its timing right.

The team statement says: "Plasma Active is innovative technology for an intelligent user experience (UX). It is intended for all types of tablets, smartphones and touch computing devices such as set-top boxes, smart TVs, home automation, in-vehicle infotainment." Its key goals, the project states, are to create a fast embedded UX platform which uses minimal memory and other resources, and which is highly flexible to support different form factors, some as-yet unimagined. It also aims to be flexible in terms of the end users, adapting as consumers change their habits and activities.

The new technology runs on top of the Linux desktop stack, including the kernel, the Qt cross-platform framework (owned by Nokia) and KDE's Plasma Framework. There are other echoes of Nokia's pre-WP7 cloud ambitions in the choice of MeeGo (along with Balsam) as the first underlying target Linux variant, though others can be substituted. The user interface is designed using Plasma Quick, a mark-up language which supports "organic" UI design based on Qt Quick.

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