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.
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?
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).
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:)
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.
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.
Im an oss maintainer and recently the slop Ive had to deal with is excruciating. Theres nothing wrong with using AI for code, but generating 10prs that are all broken cause you have no idea what youre doing and hoping to get into GSoC is nonsense.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I don't mind changing things on KDE, but the defaults are useless to me. Too many annoying things, all those time-wasting gimmicks, on-hover uselessness. It is clearly written for another target audience, e. g. Average Joe coming from Windows. While that is fine perhaps for those users, to me the default is useless. And I think many others feel in a similar way. To me the defaults in GNOME are even worse though, so it is a lose-lose scenario. But things can be configured, so that problem can be solved for most settings or behaviour; I am just not convinced that sticking to the defaults works that well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I believe they changed the app since Trixie was released (Trixie has KDE 6.3, the changes were in 6.4) and buried a lot of the really common settings behind menus. E.g. you might want to take a screenshot on a delay, and that's now hidden behind a menu whereas they used to surface the most common features on a panel.
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?
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!
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.
Except that's exactly my point. You come to that DE, you don't want to modify and optimize every single nook and cranny. I mean sure, some do, but this is a vast minority. If Linux is to become truly popular desktop, it needs DEs like Gnome, aiming at those who are just fine with all the defaults curated for them.
Or system tray icons or application menus. I have used GNOME since forever, but it became barely usable. You can bring back most functionality with extensions, but they are very buggy.
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.
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.
I am absolutely certain they're headed in the right direction, but even some minimal Usability Testing would give them tremendous amount information on all the low-hanging fruit they could fix/optimize and substantially improve the on-boarding for newcomers.
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.
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.
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
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.
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, ...)
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.
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.
The privacy angle is what stands out to me here. Most smart TV platforms are essentially surveillance devices with an entertainment UI bolted on. Having a fully open-source alternative that doesn't phone home with your viewing habits is a meaningful improvement, not just a technical curiosity. The CEC remote support is a nice practical touch too — one of the main friction points with HTPC setups has always been input methods.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I'm guessing because of a higher widevine certification level or a server-side policy?
You can also spoof Opera's user agent and get 1080p on FF so guessing it's a server-side thing; since Linux has L3 widevine certification because no kernel level TEE
I have no issues on Firefox FWIW. I haven't needed to spoof the user agent, though this is something I needed to back in the day when they literally blocked FF's user agent.
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?
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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).
> 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
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.
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.
I don't mind changing things on KDE, but the defaults are useless to me. Too many annoying things, all those time-wasting gimmicks, on-hover uselessness. It is clearly written for another target audience, e. g. Average Joe coming from Windows. While that is fine perhaps for those users, to me the default is useless. And I think many others feel in a similar way. To me the defaults in GNOME are even worse though, so it is a lose-lose scenario. But things can be configured, so that problem can be solved for most settings or behaviour; I am just not convinced that sticking to the defaults works that well.
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.
I haven't compared those two with XFCE recently, but they all seem fine these days.
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.
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...
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.
Linux has a DE like GNOME. How many DEs like GNOME does it need?
Other than that I don't have too many complaints.
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
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.
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?
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.
“Plasma” just refers to the desktop environment: https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/
So this is a “Big Screen” UI for KDE Plasma.
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.
You can also spoof Opera's user agent and get 1080p on FF so guessing it's a server-side thing; since Linux has L3 widevine certification because no kernel level TEE
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?
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!
Like no tactile controls in cars, this was also a mistake for TVs
> D-bus
alright!
on a more serious note, should remove that incase that was put there by AI.
[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
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
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.