Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

216 points - yesterday at 11:59 PM

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Comments

sho_hn today at 12:47 AM
Just to manage expectations: Big Screen is a fairly old project at this point, that has always had a relatively small number of people showing it some love (though I understand recently there's been an uptick again). This is not a new product announcement from us, nor a key focus of the community. That is not the disparage the work being done there in any way, but this most likely isn't quite Kodi just yet.
while_true_ today at 3:31 AM
"Plasma" is an awkward name for a television app. First image that comes to mind is the old plasma 50-inch I used to have. Damn thing weighed nearly 100 pounds and was really power-hungry.
olivierestsage today at 12:22 AM
Big things from KDE lately. If you haven't tried it since the pre-Plasma days, I really recommend giving it a go. Fabulous as a general DE.
DiJu519 today at 12:10 AM
What kind of "Remote" would one use to mimic say an Android TV box or normal cable company Set-Top experience?
jcelerier today at 3:30 AM
I'm really wondering about what is that ASIO4ALL uninstaller doing in there
em3rgent0rdr today at 3:24 AM
Too bad can't access $CorpStreamingVideoService full-resolution on linux :(
himata4113 today at 3:19 AM
"Built on Modern Linux Technologies"

> D-bus

alright!

on a more serious note, should remove that incase that was put there by AI.

socalgal2 today at 12:57 AM
This sounds awesome but reading the comments it sounds not quite there yet?

Right now I use an AppleTV with Kodi installed via developer account. Unfortunately, Kodi on AppleTV is not well supported so it crashes a ton. I'm not much of an Apple dev. After much gnashing of teeth I managed to get a from source build running so I could maybe look into why it crashes and contribute but I've never debugged an AppleTV app and even trying to switch to using the simulator which I suspect is better for debugging, I couldn't figure it out.

But, quite often I just wish to get some other small box for Kodi. Except I don't want 2 boxes, one for Kodi and one for other proprietary apps (Crunchyroll, Twitch, Netflix, ...)

Any suggestions?

godelski today at 12:53 AM
This is really cool and I'd love to see TVs ship with it. There's a lack of innovation these days and I think the only way to bring it back is to recognize that computers are environments and people need to be able to build on them. With TVs becoming more powerful this could be a big win.

Make it easy so my aging tech illiterate parents can use it (looks like it does the job, at least as well as any other) but also hackable for people like us, to fix bugs and drive innovation.

My TV is currently a monitor for my computer, so something like this even works for me in the same way steam big picture does. For work, I ssh in. One thing that helps is I use ydotool and my phone and laptop can easily be a keyboard

cromka today at 12:42 AM
If this can run AndroidTV apps (don't see why it couldn't), then it can be a hit.
9dc today at 12:26 AM
but it will be hard to play DRM protected media, eg Netflix on a device like this, right?
whateverboat today at 2:04 AM
KDE is the best DE out there.
kingo55 today at 12:46 AM
Are there existing alternatives to this? I use KDE, but I have also heard Steam OS has something similar.
pixelmelt today at 12:48 AM
Wow this is big, what's the best device/remote stack to use it with?
deleted today at 1:21 AM
cromka today at 1:24 AM
So... Steam TV Box confirmed?
amelius today at 1:03 AM
Now we only need a TV that doesn't send screenshots back to the vendor.
shablulman today at 12:21 AM
[dead]
functionmouse today at 1:04 AM
I've got Windows 7 at 125% running on a 70some inch TV off a tiny Optiplex Micro with an i3 or something, and a fork of modern Firefox for w7, hardware accel and all. I use my phone as a bluetooth touchpad/keyboard with an app that was maybe 5 bucks. Best 10-foot interface I've ever used. Everything works exactly as expected, no fuss, no gotchas, no friction, no workflow-breaking updates. And I never lose the remote!

This (plasma-bigscreen) is going to fail, as 10-foot interfaces historically do. It is a waste of good developer time and focus.

Free Desktop people keep obsessing over ill-advised moonshots as a form of escapism; no one wants to address the fundamentally broken core desktop model. Papercut bugs are boring and solving them is thankless. Working on a shiny new TV mode interface looks better on a resume. Meanwhile the rest of the world is pulling their hair out over Windows 11 and macOS Tahoe because there are still no feasible alternatives for normal human beings.