Professional update

I had joined MBRDI in June 2021, after almost 4 years, I decided to part ways with MBRDI this January 2025 and decided to pursue new adventure, more on that when time comes, but for now I am keeping it under wraps. I hope you can respect that! 🙂

However this is not the only professional update I want to talk about, I want to talk about another exciting opportunity,

NGI0 Core grant

I am very happy to announce that I will be working on improving Plasma Mobile (and in general, Linux Mobile) power management through funding support from the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet program. You can find very thin details on this page. Though this is not the only project that is being funded through NGI0 Core fund, There are total 56 projects being sponsored as part of October call.

To quote from above blog post,

We are happy to announce that 56 teams and individuals will receive funding to support their work on improving technologies at the core of the web, the internet and beyond — ranging from a new web browser engine, a memory-safe Javascript engine, improvements to OS system layer, declarative service deployment, designing and managing data center infrastructure, tools for chip design and emulation, secure digital signatures, software defined radio to radar signal processing. But also more end user facing applications such as user friendly web maps, platform for distributed online webinars and social media. We’d like to congratulate them and thank them for making the internet better for us all.

This indeed is very exciting opportunity for me and I am privileged to be part of such an amazing cohort.

So what is this project about?

One of major complain we get when talking to the users of KDE Plasma Mobile is that they do not have useful battery life, either device needs to be charged twice in day or in worst case more. Of-course this is not “only Plasma Mobile” issue, but certain devices have changes pending on kernel side that will improve things greatly when merged or developed. Even though kernel offers many functionalities which current user-space is not making use of, for example, auto-sleep, CPU/GPU frequency scaling when idle, runtime suspend for peripherals like touch panel etc. In addition there are also some user-experience relevant issues like not being able to reliably receive push notifications, calls or alarm notifications when device is in suspend.

My project is to work on fixing some of these issues to improve overall battery-life and user-experience for Plasma Mobile in terms of power management. I also hope to collaborate with other Linux mobile projects such as Phosh, GNOME mobile, Ubuntu Touch etc to standardize as well as share different pre-existing solutions.

I hope to make more detailed blog post about these topics individually later on but for now just wanted to give a quick update while it is fresh and want to thank many people who were involved in making this happen. Thanks to Felix, Lydia, Volker, Jakob, Devin, Natalie, Jos, Eike and anyone else whom I forgot who helped me with this proposal and provided support! 🥰