Marco Mattiolo

Electrical engineer in real life, Linux user since 2006, first with Ubuntu Dapper and then Debian Lenny. Stayed on Debian since, first sid (sidux/aptosid/...), then testing and now stable, with the evolution of needs and reduction of available time.

I attended some numerical programming course at university and then went deeper into the programming via some self-taught C language books, weeks spent after ProjectEuler problems and some embedded programming on Microchip PICs, both on demo and self-designed circuit boards.

Got into the maintainers' side of things in 2022, when I started reporting regressions and testing fixes with Mobian distribution on PinePhone and later OnePlus6 phones. I got impressed by how much can be done in a FLOSS project without being experienced developers, then in this inspiring report-discuss-test-learn cycles I ended up maintaining some of the branches of the qcom-linux repository within the Mobian team [1], targeted at the Linux kernel patched for some phone devices based on Qualcomm system-on-chip (SoC). I've been daily-driving Mobian devices without stops since March this year, mainly op6-enchilada featuring the sdm845 chipset. After the general lack of maintainers for the sdm845-mainline repository (intended as collector for the set of patches to be applied on top of Linux for the sdm845-based devices), I tried to step up and propose a 7.2-sdm845 branch as a common basis between Mobian and pmOS, but tests on the pmOS side weren't good [2], while I'm using 7.2-sdm845 in Mobian without major issues [3].

When I started helping Mobian, it had mainly one UI available (Phosh) and relevantly lacking Plasma mobile. Being a KDE user since the KDE 3.5 days, I got my feet wet into the packaging by proposing for packaging and maintaining the plasma-mobile shell's and some of its main apps' packages in Debian. Plasma-mobile itself got into Debian archive for bookworm, while Mobian started distributing a plasma-mobile image few months later [4]. I'm co-operating inside the Debian Qt/KDE team to the maintenance of such packages, plus reporting to upstream the issues I find while packaging new releases [5].

As a DM candidate, I plan to continue maintaining Plasma Mobile apps within the Debian Qt/KDE team and continue the activity within Mobian team and its close relative DebianOnMobile team.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/devices/kernels/qcom-linux [2] https://gitlab.nura.eco/nura/pmaports/-/merge_requests/9216 [3] https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/devices/kernels/qcom-linux/-/merge_requests/47 [4] https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/mobian-recipes/-/merge_requests/96 [5] https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?f1=reporter&list_id=3610051&o1=equals&v1=%25user%25