Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

https://plasma-bigscreen.org

by PaulHoule • 5 months ago

673 228 5 months ago

plasma-bigscreen.org

DiJu519• 5 months ago

What kind of "Remote" would one use to mimic say an Android TV box or normal cable company Set-Top experience?

accurrent• 5 months ago

I use kde connect with my android for my htpc. Works nicely enough on stoxk kde.

lynndotpy• 5 months ago

This is listed on the linked page. KDE makes the excellent KDE Connect. You can also use a TV remote, game controller, or keyboard and mouse.

haunter2• 5 months ago

Unified Remote with my phone https://www.unifiedremote.com/

JoshTriplett• 5 months ago

There are many bluetooth remotes you can use for this. You may want one that has a built-in keyboard, or just one with arrows and a handful of buttons.

drnick111• 5 months ago

My suggestion would be an airmouse remote, possibly with an built-in keyboard. This is because sooner or later you will want to use a web browser to stream content, and a mouse is incredibly convenient for that.

PufPufPuf• 5 months ago

I have this one, acts like a mouse (gyroscope) and keyboard (arrows, back, home, vol+- on the front side, almost-full qwerty on the back).

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006860823468.html

herzzolf• 5 months ago

If your HTPC supports HDMI-CEC, it will just pass-through the inputs from the TV remote, no additional ones required.

suprjami• 5 months ago

Look up "USB RF remote" on eBay. There are two common ones you'll see everywhere. I have one for my Kodi system.

r14c• 5 months ago

I use KDE connect, it has a really nice remote input feature.

olivierestsage• 5 months ago

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.

simonask• 5 months ago

Just did recently. I remembered KDE as flexible but cluttered. It’s still flexible, but they really cleaned up nice!

brendyn• 5 months ago

Try going in to edit mode you'll freak out if you not prepared

cromka11• 5 months ago

I did, but I don't share the sentiment. Moved this year from macOS and KDE is over-engineered with little thought put into the UX. For example, try to take a screenshot. I was quite literally shaking my head for good couple minutes looking at this abomination. It's so extremely confusing, all over the place, bogged down with tons of switches, modes, it's like you need to spend 30 minutes to understand how this thing works and all the Whys. Took me couple days to realize it was an actual Photo app in its screenshot mode. If only they spent some of their increasing budget on some proper UX usability testing and not rely on their people's gut feelings and a "that'll do" mentality...

Meanwhile, Gnome just works exactly like you'd expect it to. I said it before already, but Gnome is for people moving from macOS and KDE is for ex-Windows veterans. And, for the record, I don't want to praise Gnome's overly-minimalistic approach, either, which too gets annoying when you have to find an extension for every stupid extra setting beyond the defaults. But, all in all, I much prefer it over KDE and wouldn't switch back. Not to mention the aesthetics, because there's no comparison if one shares the Apple/Braun ideals on design.

A plot twist here is that I am also a KDE app developer...

EnPissant• 5 months ago

I really like KDE plasma, it's the best DE out there once configured to mimick Gnome 2 / Mate, but I agree with you on screenshots! Also, Konsole required much configuration to be not way too busy.

Other than that I don't have too many complaints.

jasonjayr• 5 months ago

I'm on Debian bookworm, and a screenshot is one Meta-Shift-S -- I just highlight the region I want to capture, and I get a dialog prompting me to (with one click) copy to clipboard, save to file, or annotate. There's a handful of out-of-the-way options as well, depending on what exactly you want to do. What's --- so abominable about that?

rjh29• 5 months ago

You can just change the screenshot program you use, it's a keyboard shortcut. Flexibility and customisation is the best reason to use Linux after all.

bee_rider• 5 months ago

The nice thing about Linux is that there’s a DE or WM for everyone. Personally I can’t imagine running a whole desktop environment when all I want is to draw some windows and a status bar. But, to each their own!

F3nd0• 5 months ago

What Photo app are you referring to? On Debian Trixie, I just get the screenshot app, Spectacle. It shows the screenshot it just took, tells me where it’s been saved, lets me do stuff with it, and lets me take another one. It could do with a facelift, but it’s fairly clear, really. I wonder if they changed it later or if the distribution you used deviated from the defaults.

tapoxi• 5 months ago

I just hit printscreen and save, I think you may be confusing your familiarity with a system with user friendliness.

For comparison, MacOS doesn't have a printscreen key, it's command-shift-3 or command-shift-4. Much more confusing to newcomers in my experience.

fxde• 5 months ago

I don't get how this can lead to confusion. You can hit PrintScr, draw a rectangle and hit save, or enter "screenshot" into the bottom left menu, rectangle, save. There you can also see the common options with shortcuts for "Full Screen" etc, at least on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I would assume that is the default behaviour.

himata41136• 5 months ago

What are you talking about, spectacle is everything I want in a screenshot tool and I do not want it to be any other way. If you want something that just takes a picture then you might as well go back to 2012.

wao0uuno9• 5 months ago

So you chose the outstanding screenshot utility to highlight the problems with KDE Plasma interface? Really? Why not something like this?: https://files.catbox.moe/uvxbea.png

dddgghhbbfblk• 5 months ago

I recently installed Fedora with KDE Plasma on a new computer and I can't say I feel the same way. The UI is still clunky (eg the file explorer is clunky) and I'm running into minor bugs pretty regularly. Windows will be sized incorrectly after a restore sometimes (failing to take into account the bar I added at the top), switching between multiple windows of the same program and a separate program seems non-deterministic, random UI components occasionally crash and restart.

I don't want to be negative for the sake of it but I constantly read these really positive comments about Linux on the desktop (in general or in specifics) and it gave me a false impression of what to expect. Not the first time I've fallen for this either over the years.

WD-423• 5 months ago

There’s a reason GNOME is the default for most of the major distributions.

alpaca1282• 5 months ago

It's rare to see a perfectly stable desktop UI in general. Even on my Mac and iPhone minor bugs are almost a daily occurrence. But KDE especially is a combination of huge scope and limited resources, whenever I used it there was always something obviously unpolished.

AnonHP• 5 months ago

How is it on older or budget hardware though? It’s been a long time since I tried KDE, and in between even worked with Xfce because Gnome was a bit more resource intensive. Is it still the case that in terms of hardware specs and demand of the hardware, KDE needs/uses more than Gnome? I guess Xfce will be in a different league capability wise and resource requirement wise.

hnlmorg2• 5 months ago

I’m running it on a ~15 year old Intel NUC.

It’s got 4GB RAM and a modest Intel i3.

KDE runs flawlessly. While modern web browsers struggle with more than a few tabs open.

dvdgsng• 5 months ago

If that counts for you, but I've just used it with CachyOS on a 2017 XPS with no issues and performance was great.

pabs3• 5 months ago

Running it on a dumpsterd PC with a 2013 Intel CPU. Works fine.

hedora• 5 months ago

I use LXDE on my new boxes, but on a 15 year old machine I wasn't sure what the Linux distro had defaulted to. I was surprised to see it was KDE. That machine takes 30 sec to decrypt the disk encryption key (stupid proof of work functions!), but the desktop environment is as snappy as LXDE on high-end 2026 machines.

I haven't compared those two with XFCE recently, but they all seem fine these days.

yjftsjthsd-h4• 5 months ago

AIUI, they actually really made an effort to improve on that front, to the point that KDE is actually really good about resource use these days, which is eg. why it was picked as the default for the pinetab 2.

bpye• 5 months ago

I run it on my RK3588 based MNT Pocket Reform. I have to force the GL ES 2 backend because of, presumably, Panfrost bugs, but otherwise it runs well despite the fairly weak CPU and GPU.

monegator4• 5 months ago

define older? no problem on my 2012 macbook

ryukoposting2• 5 months ago

How old and what budget? I spent a good chunk of the late 2010s rocking Plasma 5 on a machine with a first-gen i5. It 8 GB of RAM and an SSD, which probably helped, but it ran great!

Oanid3• 5 months ago

I'd have to disagree with you on that one. I recently migrated to Fedora from Windows 11, which gave me the chance to try Plasma, GNOME, and a couple other desktops.

Plasma is exactly what I don't want in a DE. It’s extremely configurable, but also overwhelming, and I don’t think that’s something the average user would feel comfortable navigating.

I ended up choosing GNOME. It feels visually cohesive, and the design is much more opinionated — they’ve clearly made decisions about what should and shouldn’t be part of the core desktop experience.

vrighter• 5 months ago

so just.... don't reconfigure it?

shevy-java4• 5 months ago

I settled down for Fluxbox back when it was still actively maintained. Ever since its death I have been using IceWM, mostly because it is so much faster than GNOME or KDE-Plasma. I think both KDE and GNOME went into the wrong direction though. GNOME because it forces everyone into the shell-centric way to use a computer, similar to a smartphone (the whole UI constantly reminds me of a cloned OSX smartphone interface, for GNOME3 that is; mate-desktop is more of a desktop-centric UI but sadly the project slowed down immensely in the last few years, aka becoming more and more inactive really). KDE indeed has too many configure-options, but the defaults are more similar to the 1990s desktop-centric era shaped by Microsoft. I like that approach more than GNOME although in the last few years KDE also went the wrong way, largely due to Nate, David Edmundson ("our destiny is systemd"; that reminds me of Firefox "you must have pulseaudio for audio on youtube", how strange I can hear audio via chromium/thorium just fine, so what are the Mozilla devs thinking here ... not much, that is for sure) etc...

monegator4• 5 months ago

Dude, default plasma breeze theme, remove rounded corners, you have the windows 10 interface. What else do you want?

ryukoposting2• 5 months ago

I don't see how Plasma is any easier or harder to navigate than Windows. If you find the customizations overwhelming, then just... don't. It's fine in its stock form. I turn off the top-left corner thing and leave everything else alone.

yoavm• 5 months ago

Thank you for saying this. Power users love to complain about how GNOME took away many settings and options, and just made some hard decisions. I left GNOME many years ago since I miss these options, but I'm going to refer to your comment the next time people complain about the direction they took: there clearly is an audience of people that simply don't care about customizing every bit of their desktop environment, and GNOME is targeting exactly them. It's an audience we must cater to if we want Linux on the desktop to be successful.

jorvi• 5 months ago

Not only that, because it has so many options and more of a bazaar-style development, nothing is optimized.

Right now the systray has a very ugly delay when opening applets like WiFi or sound. Up to 1.5 seconds (!). This doesn't happen with the applets bare in the menu bar, so there must be some sort of negative interaction there between the systray code and applet code.

This is on a bog standard KDE install too.

I don't like Gnome's high and mighty attitude either, especially because it chases people away from making bug reports or contributing. And when 90%+ of your users uses a particular extension (Dash to Dock), maybe make that behaviour integrated and the default.

At this point my hope is squarely aimed at PopOS' COSMIC environment.

prmph• 5 months ago

I couldn't disagree more.

I have found KDE excellent and intuitive from the get go without much customization. To me GNOME is very primitive in comparison and ugly too.

KDE is the DE that made shed the bias again linux UIs as having that crummy look that set them apart from commercial desktops.

Sure it has issues (which mostly crop up when you are doing deep customization) but for the basics I don't even think any other Linux DE come close.

Pxtl5• 5 months ago

Really? I found KDE plasma hit the perfect sweet spot between the slapdash nature of Cinnamon and the polished but restrictive Gnome.

Plus AFAIK it's the most multi threaded so it's the hardest to freeze.

wolvoleo• 5 months ago

I totally agree it's not for the average user but I'm not an average user. That's why I like it so much. I love the way I can make my computer work the way I want it, rather than being stuck with someone else's design decisions and having to adapt to them (I really hate opinionated design). My KDE is customized heavily though I never needed to use addons because it's so configurable.

I really like this about KDE. And the number of options isn't in the way. When I'm thinking of something new to do there's usually an option for just that that I'd never seen before. I love software like that that feels way ahead of me, almost anticipating my wishes.

Gnome on the other hand, their developers have this attitude of "you shouldn't want to do this". I don't like software or other people telling me what to do. I'm sure their stuff is based on UI principles but those are made for the masses too. I only care about what works for me.

But yeah I'm a power user, that's not for everyone. I love that KDE exists though. And it's great that you like gnome, that's the power of Linux/FOSS.

The only thing I object to is when people claim Linux should get one standard UI (and then they usually want that to be gnome). That's not ok for me. But it's also impossible to enforce anyway.

iberator• 5 months ago

its awful. using computers since win 3.11

arendtio2• 5 months ago

Pre-Plasma days? OMG, that seems like a really old version, like KDE 3.x?

9dc• 5 months ago

but it will be hard to play DRM protected media, eg Netflix on a device like this, right?

trueismywork• 5 months ago

720p using widevine. I play it. It works. Even if I disable DRM in my main browser. And only isolate it to my Netflix account.

haunter2• 5 months ago

You can get 1080p on Linux with Opera https://help.netflix.com/en/node/30081

3eb7988a1663• 5 months ago

Is that through a dedicated Netflix profile or is there a way to enable DRM per site?

himata41136• 5 months ago

the magic trick is just to not, netflix won't even stream you 4k 90% of the time even if you do have all the requirements.

nextaccountic• 5 months ago

why won't they?

drnick111• 5 months ago

This is just a DE for Linux, it does not solve the problem that DRM is incompatible with a free platform. Get your content from another source than Netflix.

cromka11• 5 months ago

If this can run AndroidTV apps (don't see why it couldn't), then it can be a hit.

drnick111• 5 months ago

Bigscreen is just basically a DE. To run Android apps on Linux you can use Waydroid. But yes, you can absolutely combine Bigscreen, Waydroid and a few other apps such as VacuumTube and Steam in fullscreen mode to create the ultimate free/libre streaming/gaming console.

mongol• 5 months ago

VacuumTube is fantastic

kingo55• 5 months ago

Are there existing alternatives to this? I use KDE, but I have also heard Steam OS has something similar.

himata41136• 5 months ago

steamos is just kde.

yjftsjthsd-h4• 5 months ago

SteamOS uses KDE for their "desktop" session, but does their own thing for the normal gaming mode.

sho_hn2• 5 months ago

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.

drnick111• 5 months ago

but this most likely isn't quite Kodi just yet.

Kodi is incredibly limited though, and does not come close to the flexibility of Plasma Bigscreen. The latter is just a UI optimized for using a PC from a couch, which means that you can use any regular desktop app, including Kodi, web browsers for streaming content, and Steam for playing games. Kodi on the other hand does not even allow you to play YT videos without using some buggy add-on that requires registering an API key with Google (no thanks).

wao0uuno9• 5 months ago

Also Kodis interface is terrible. I couldn't make a more convoluted and hard to navigate interface for TVs even if I tried.

j1elo• 5 months ago

As a Kodi user, I must say it is very good on its core, and very bad on the addons side (which arguably is the part for which it gets recommended mostly)

It forces its limited model of text-based folders-with-files to everything. Also it's all Python, and I don't know if it's me but I always find quality issues first in Python projects than anything else. Error control is usually very lacking, and it's so frequent to see error pop-ups showing on here and there. You enter a menu and the first entry selected is ".." which is to go back to the previous menu (poor UX). All in all, Kodi for me has always been a player with good tech (it all basically works, surround sound, codecs, integration with hardware, etc), exposed as very amateurish UI experiences.

zozbot234• 5 months ago

Could this same kind of interface have potential for use in the handheld console form factor? The gamepad-like buttons on a handheld are often reminiscent of those on a TV remote control. The handheld generally adds touchscreen control, but this feels like it might be comparatively easy to account for. Of course, ultimately we'd probably want to see something that's sort of halfway between this Bigscreen and Plasma Mobile. Perhaps a new project altogether?

sfRattan• 5 months ago

You could probably just try this on a Steam Deck. SteamOS is just a custom atomic spin of Arch, with full KDE already installed (switch to Desktop mode), and the device is a touchscreen. I don't have mine in front of me at the moment, but I imagine Plasma Bigscreen is already in the Arch or AUR repositories.

shevy-java4• 5 months ago

Ah - that just answers the question I asked above then (e. g. two minutes ago), meaning there is no donation-daemon running, if it is an old project. Very interesting.

sho_hn2• 5 months ago

The module that does the annual donation thingie should also load here, there isn't really any differentiation by the shell package as it's handled elsewhere via a mechanism that's agnostic to it.

yjftsjthsd-h4• 5 months ago

Yeah, it's sad; this is probably exactly what I want to use, but it isn't really in a good state yet. Thankfully, just normal KDE works fine on my TV for now:)

ognarb• 5 months ago

To be fair. Plasma BiScreen is now lead by Devin Lin which has done a amazing job moving Plasma Mobile once the initial sponsor of it turned its interest somewhere else. So i am quite happy to see the progress there :)

pixelmelt• 5 months ago

Wow this is big, what's the best device/remote stack to use it with?

drnick111• 5 months ago

For streaming, any mini-PC (e.g. N100 or a used thin client) paired with an airmouse remote (I use a Pepperjobs remote). If you want to use Steam on that machine and play modern games however, then you basically need a gaming PC and an Xbox controller.

godelski2• 5 months ago

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

socalgal22• 5 months ago

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?

brcmthrowaway• 5 months ago

Claude ?

socalgal22• 5 months ago

Thanks for the push. It worked.

J_tt• 5 months ago

I’ve just moved from Kodi on a Linux box to Jellyfin and Infuse on an Apple TV, so far fantastic experience

s0rce• 5 months ago

I also moved from Kodi to Jellyfin. I have an ubuntu machine as the server and an Nvidia shield with Android connected to the TV as a client. Works great and was much simpler to keep working right than Kodi. Although Kodi didn't need any server side software except SMB shares.

ritlo3• 5 months ago

Same set-up here. Had tried many times over something like 15 years to get Kodi/XBMC working well. Nobody else could/would ever use it (the UI is so bad) and I bet I spent about 50% as much time screwing around to set it up and maintain it as I ever spent watching stuff on it.

Jellyfin, at first with the official client on Roku then on Infuse on AppleTV when x265 hardware decoding started becoming a requirement (my server is too weak to transcode) has been everything I wanted Kodi to be. Web interface is great, I share it with a couple friends over Tailscale. Wife and kids and visitors use Infuse, no problem, no complaints, no help needed. My use-to-fiddling ratio is probably literally 100x better than with Kodi. I have spent overall less total time messing with it than with Kodi, even including figuring out solutions for things like YouTube videos.

hapticmonkey• 5 months ago

Depends what you use Kodi for. If it’s for accessing media files on a network drive, Infuse is the “gold standard” media player for the AppleTV.

It’s not free, though. But it’s far more stable and nicer to use than Kodi ever was in my experience. I ran Kodi for my home theatre for years but switched to AppleTV+Infuse and never looked back.

For free (and open source!) options you can use the Swiftfin tvOS app and a Jellyfin media server.

zos_kia• 5 months ago

If you have an Android box, you can set Kodi as the launcher (so the home button will always take you to Kodi home). It has a section that lists Android apps and lets you run them from there.

It's a bit backwards but I did it for years, and it works really well if you're ok with the Kodi experience.

wao0uuno9• 5 months ago

"Kodi on AppleTV is not well supported so it crashes a ton"

That's just Kodis default behavior on any platform.

The_President2• 5 months ago

Kodi is stable - This assertion must be limited to hardware at your disposal. File a bug report.

amelius3• 5 months ago

Now we only need a TV that doesn't send screenshots back to the vendor.

drnick111• 5 months ago

This is easy, don't connect your TV to the Internet and use it as a monitor for a mini PC running Plasma Bigscreen.

amelius3• 5 months ago

If enough people do this, new TVs will stop working without an internet connection.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 5 months ago

don't connect your TV to the Internet

5G fixes this

functionmouse• 5 months ago

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.

gzread• 5 months ago

If 10foot is ill-advised then why do you use one?

cromka11• 5 months ago

So... Steam TV Box confirmed?

whateverboat• 5 months ago

KDE is the best DE out there.

himata41136• 5 months ago

"Built on Modern Linux Technologies"

D-bus

alright!

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

phanimahesh• 5 months ago

Wait dbus isn't considered modern? What's the alternative these days?

himata41136• 5 months ago

There's not, but it's also a very very old technology - definitely not 'modern' linux.

It has a lot of problems especially with protocol standartization and permissions. You can tell something and you might get something back or you might listen for something and get garbage instead.

The maker of hyprland has shipped an alternative though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46278857

aidenn0• 5 months ago

If I had to guess, I would guess that this statement was put there before ChatGPT existed.

[edit]

Unless this text was buried deeper than the front page and then promoted, I was wrong. That language was not there last November according to archive.org

em3rgent0rdr• 5 months ago

Too bad can't access $CorpStreamingVideoService full-resolution on linux :(

drnick111• 5 months ago

Get your videos from other sources.

jcelerier• 5 months ago

I'm really wondering about what is that ASIO4ALL uninstaller doing in there

while_true_• 5 months ago

"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.

hnlmorg2• 5 months ago

“Plasma” isn’t the name of the television app. It’s “Big Screen”.

“Plasma” just refers to the desktop environment: https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/

So this is a “Big Screen” UI for KDE Plasma.

account425• 4 months ago

Plasma was also a stupid name for the DE, especially when it already had a better name that everyone knows.

64738• 5 months ago

Yes! I still use my Panasonic 50" plasma as my daily driver. I still love it, it's an amazing TV :D

cheeze• 5 months ago

I loved my Plasma TV.

Bought it as an intern dirt cheap off of some dude at my company who posted it in a email group. He upgraded to the latest and greatest and just wanted it hauled out. Picture quality (for the time) was incredible!

It also doubled as the worlds best space heater. My god it was power hungry.

ehnto• 5 months ago

Super cool, I have been extremely pleased with my switch to KDE. I have used MacOS as a daily, I have used Windows 95-Win10, I have used various linux distros all for long periods of time at work and home.

KDE Plasma has really hit the sweetspot for me, it's super usable daily and still has easy customisability. Thanks to all the effort poured into Proton I have even replaced my gaming PC with Arch/KDE plasma with really very little stress.

I am VR gaming, on linux, on AAA titles, with no messing around, if this isn't the year of linux desktop then it will never be.

akshatjiwan• 5 months ago

KDE is amazing. For an open-source project the desktop environment looks really slick. Not that any other desktop environments are particularly ugly but KDE can compete with the best commercially developed desktops.

For a moment though I thought that this story was about the launch of a new plasma TV 'big screen' and it got me really excited.

dboon• 5 months ago

Yes! KDE is the only thing in the Linux world that legitimately looks better than the big competitors. Not always, and not all the time; programs that are really focused on design are still a cut above, but I truly believe that KDE looks (and feels!) better than macOS

I don't understand why there aren't more folks like us shouting it from the rooftops. It's almost bizarre how good it looks.

jwrallie• 5 months ago

I’m curious about which distros are working well with Plasma, as I had some trouble with stability in the past. I have the feeling Plasma works better with rolling release.

arendtio2• 5 months ago

KDE is amazing. For an open-source project the desktop environment looks really slick.

That is clearly an understatement. For me, it is the best desktop environment out there.

I don't want to say that it is perfect (there have been many versions over the years which clearly were not (e.g. KDE 4.0)), but none of the other desktop environments (including Windows and MacOS) have a similar feature set:

- mainstream UX principles like Windows - beautiful as MacOS - customizable and extendable like no other

I have to work with MacOS every day, and it is just painful to see how much better KDE is when it is not available...

shevy-java4• 5 months ago

Does anyone know whether Nate's donation-daemon is disabled on this device, by default? Because if it is, then this invites to a critical follow-up question: aka WHY is it disabled there, but not by default elsewhere for regular users of KDE. Nate, via his biased blog entries, constantly tries to reason how vital it is to pressure people (sorry; "voluntarily remind them that donations are acceptable for the KDE devs") into donating to KDE (e. g. his self-promo "what a success story I just did, we made millions!"), so if it is disabled on the TV device, it actually means that regular desktop users are a second-class citizen to him. KDE really took a strange turn ever since Nate took control of the project. Personally I much prefer the oldschool KDE approach; now suddenly we have "systemd is the only future" and other oddities way aside from the pester-Robin-Hood-daemon demanding more of your moneyz ...

The_President2• 5 months ago

For the sake of long term success of the KDE project - it needs a major public financial, secuirity, and bug audit. It would be worth seeing if the KDE project would use donation money to cover outside firms to audit their operations and code.

OsrsNeedsf2P2• 5 months ago

They have an Expenses breakdown in each year's fundraiser[0] page.

https://kde.org/fundraisers/

account425• 4 months ago

There is a term for making user-hostile changes for the sake of success: enshittification.

I'd rather not have free software turn into shareware.

OsrsNeedsf2P2• 5 months ago

They made 467,889 euros in donations in 2024. This is the desktop environment that is an incumbent to taking market share from Windows. Is your comment serious?

freshnode• 5 months ago

Unpopular opinion, perhaps - isn't this just tech looking for a problem to solve?

The fact that the apps I would actually care about having on real estate on my front room seem to be nowhere to be seen is kinda glaring from my perspective... I know there's a certain purism to having Firefox front and center... But really?

yjftsjthsd-h4• 5 months ago

I'd argue that that's orthogonal; this is making the general UI work well on a TV, then apps get populated into that. And honestly I'll bet that for most uses Firefox working well is what you want, since a handful of shortcuts to open Firefox to assorted streaming services would do the trick quite nicely.

dqv• 5 months ago

I immediately envisioned having my feed reader as a FireFox shortcut and being able to navigate to YouTube videos from that.

Another thing is that I've found certain old movies can only be streamed from weird websites - as in https://weirdstreamingwebsite is the only licensed entity to have it. I could either buy a VHS (which is what we did) or stream it. But since a physical copy might not be available, the only option would be to use that weird website to stream it. There is no app!

drnick111• 5 months ago

Firefox, and airmouse, and an adblocker are the main tools to free yourself from commercial streaming services.

mattcantstop• 5 months ago

This combined with a tv that had tactile buttons again would be nice! So tired of the buttonless TVs now, or the buttons that have no tactile feedback so you don't know what you are doing in the dark.

Like no tactile controls in cars, this was also a mistake for TVs

evolve2k2• 5 months ago

I just want to help, throw a task at me!
Great! We always need help. In order to find something that you find fun and rewarding to work on, a good first step is to find out which itch you have with Plasma Bigscreen, and how it can be scratched. What's nagging you? Now give us a shout-out, best via the Plasma mailing list. You can also make yourself known in the Matrix channel. There's plenty to do, tasks for every skill and level, and you'll find it's fun to work on and learn from each other.

https://plasma-bigscreen.org/contributing

1. Open issues on Gitlab:

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/issues

2. Join the Plasma mailing list here:

https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel

3. Join the Matrix channel and say you want a task here:

https://matrix.to/#/%23plasma-bigscreen:kde.org

zer0zzz• 5 months ago

This looks good

hsbauauvhabzb• 5 months ago

This is cool, I’m curious to try, are there any competing OSS projects in this space that I should compare?

wao0uuno9• 5 months ago

LibreELEC/Kodi

IshKebab2• 5 months ago

Why have they done the stupid LG thing and wasted half the screen on empty background? I don't understand it.

aucisson_masque2• 5 months ago

How you're going to be able to use Firefox or thunderbird with a tv remote ?

It's great that they work on a tv ui for kde but I feel like it's really not going to work well on anything but a monitor with mouse and keyboard.

vermilingua• 5 months ago

Most modern TVs (not to mention SBCs you could just connect with HDMI) have bluetooth/USB for keyboard & mouse

drnick111• 5 months ago

You can use an airmouse remote for that.

atoav• 5 months ago

If you have regular KDE I urge you to just shake your mouse vigorously for ca. a minute. The cursor has this mouse finding feature where the mouse cursor gets bigger if you shake it. It can get comically big, like fill the whole screen big.

One of the best features I have ever seen.

wao0uuno9• 5 months ago

I discovered it yesterday by accident. Not the feature but the fact the cursor just keeps on growing and growing. Kinda funny but also possibly a bug.

einr• 5 months ago

This feature is borrowed from macOS, but on macOS it doesn't grow indefinitely.

71bw3• 5 months ago

...and yet overall its done better than on Mac, because in full-screen apps or 3D games it doesn't start covering your view:-)

xrd2• 5 months ago

I can't for the life of me figure out if this is a way to put KDE on my TV by overwriting the existing OS, or if this is something to install on a computer which I then plug my TV into via HDMI.

I'm not being lazy here but I have reviewed this site and outbound links. And, I have reviewed the threads there.

I'm very interested in repurposing my LG Smart TV and have been hesitant about installing a software package on it.

If I brick the TV I'm fearful my kids will burn me at the stake.

I don't see a listed hardware matrix, but do see a link to enter into the matrix server and ask questions. I don't see packages or a repository to add.

I think llms generally produce quite a bit of slop content but I think they could be used to explain open source projects a bit better. This seems like an opportunity.

evolve2k2• 5 months ago

I could totally wrong, but my assumption is that you’d get a small dedicated box (mini PC) that has an display port/hdmi/lightning port and usb ports and plug that into your TV like you would an Apple TV.

A remote control with wifi would work pretty easily by being connected into usb port, just like a wireless mouse.

Something like an ASUS NUC comes to mind for me but it’s designed to work with anything that you can install Linux on. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=asus+nuc&_trksid=p46248...

xrd2• 5 months ago

Ok. That makes sense.

I wonder if you can then use Netflix and other streaming services? I have a Chromecast device and could probably just switch the HDMI to use that. I can use Netflix on my Linux laptop but I haven't tried Disney and I would very much doubt Apple+ would work on KDE.

darkwater3• 5 months ago

Since this is not going to be released any time soon, any suggestions on what could be used to be a TV UI for Jellyfin? It should just show that, nothing else. Currently I'm using a Nintendo Switch with Switchfin and it's pretty neat but sometimes even transcoded streams stutter or make the fan go brrrrr

reedlaw• 5 months ago

Plasma Bigscreen has been around for 6 years: https://itsfoss.com/news/plasma-bigscreen-comeback/

darkwater3• 5 months ago

I was referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47283124

Anyway, I will try it in its current status. I basically need a launcher for the desktop Jellyfin app and not much more

theandrewbailey• 5 months ago

I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. While I prefer XFCE in general, KDE works much better on touchscreens. I have a handful of old first gen Microsoft Surface Hubs sitting around. I wonder if this Bigscreen mode supports touch, if so it might be awesome on a 55" (or 84") touchscreen.

ajot• 5 months ago

Of note: Plasma Bigscreen was sort of revived and rejuvenated last year by a Plasma Mobile dev

https://espi.dev/posts/2025/07/plasma-bigscreen/

jrm43• 5 months ago

At the risk of whatever, I feel like there might be a "market" for something like the "OpenBox" version of this - or perhaps what I'm saying is even using something like Openbox to get the minimalist version of this thing.

Seems to me a 10-foot interface almost by definition doesn't need the complexity of a KDE; you need to launch apps from "big rectangles on the screen" instead of like a Start Menu(and probably configure those to be 10 foot friendly) -- and MAYBE a few widgets and that's it.

I've always wondered why that doesn't seem to exist, and now probably with vibe coding may just work on it myself.

ducktastic• 5 months ago

I'm totally with you on this and a great idea. Always used flux/openbox whenever I could on my own workstations, and the idea that it could be used for a big screen device would be great.

Imustaskforhelp• 5 months ago

Joe's Window manager might be a better choice than Openbox (imo) if someone does want to work on it.

Maybe FLTK/FLWM can be interesting as well.

iririririr• 5 months ago

and after you launch the app, then what? are you rewriting chrome or firefox?

regular kde is usable enough on my tv from the couch, just bump font size and 200% scaling. done.

these ideas are reminiscent of a time people thought kiosk modes were a good idea.

what one call complexity most people can being able to do anything at all.

jrm43• 5 months ago

I have no idea what you're getting at here; I already use firefox from the couch?

ritlo3• 5 months ago

Build it on Retroarch and you don’t even need X/Wayland. And the menu/launching functionality is done, you’d just be making a theme for it.

Really if someone made a WebKit “core” and a Jellyfin client “core” (which, actually, you might get “for free” with the browser if you can tolerate web bloat on your platform) under libretro it’d be a pretty damn capable set-top-box UI. All the “cores” right now are games/emulators, but they don’t have to be.

jrm43• 5 months ago

This is a very interesting take -- I wonder how it would deal with web browsers? I'm curious because I actually did try to add firefox to my Steam Deck as a "game" and it couldn't deal with multiple windows?

kogasa240p• 5 months ago

Might use this when I finally set up my media server pc, I know Kodi is optimal but I do want to use that computer for other server related things.

StevenNunez• 5 months ago

Please take my Samsung TV interface

arikrahman• 5 months ago

So when they said Plasma TVs would be the next big thing, this is what they meant. Jolly good show.

prmoustache• 5 months ago

I just scale my regular desktop to 133 or 150% when I plug my laptop to my video projector and use that old cordless keyboard/trackpad combo from microsoft or logitech (can't remember and can't verify right now, thise with a usb receptor) I bought 2 decades ago.

I don't really think a specific TV like interface would make it more user friendly really. It is much faster to browse and select files than on any remote based interface I have ever used on dedicated devices (or video game consoles). Turns out we have never made any better device than a keyboard to type search words :-)

I could use kdeconnect to control a lot of stuff like volume / play/pause / next buttons from my smartphone but I don't even do that as the keyboard+trackpad combo is always available next to me anyway.

account425• 4 months ago

Cool. Can they make it so it doesn't move all your windows around whenever you turn on/off or when KWin crashes first?

Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

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