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Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

Fair but the point is you are trying to solve the problem with the wrong tool.

GP adapted the the form factor to his needs.

The remote form factor was created for a long gone use case of 'zapping' through channels coming from an analog source.

Home theater nowadays has no similarity with the interface needs of cable/satellite TV, so why would you be hung up on using the same remote control interface?

Remote controls have been tortured into fitting smart TVs with ever more ridiculous tiny buttons and confusing silk labels the remote control concept needs to be retired anyway.

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>GP adapted the the form factor to his needs.

My point is that drastic I/O adaptation almost always require UI/UX adaptations, which doesn't happen with these enthusiast projects.

>Home theater nowadays has no similarity with the interface needs of cable/satellite TV, so why would you be hung up on using the same remote control interface?

Because that's what people use. If we went by some "blank slate" argument then we could make a ton of things possible, but that's not what this problem is about. Additionally, even if you had a keyboard+touchpad combo, would you rather use your TV from your couch with GNOME or XFCE or would you prefer Kodi's interface?

I use Gnome on my TV, with a Bluetooth keyboard. It works great. I don't see what advantage Kodi's interface has.

I use MATE. I'd like a better tv-tuner application, because that's a hole in FOSS, but I also can't stand the Kodi interface although I've have made many attempts to adopt it to my use case from back when it was XBMC. The Kodi interface is more annoying and difficult to navigate than a standard PC desktop with the font sizes bumped up used with remote keyboard/touchpad that is smaller than my remote.

Kodi is theoretically a better fit for the 10-foot display use case. It also has a bunch of features built in for dealing with video libraries, their management/filtering and so on that you won't get with a generic interface like the Gnome or KDE file browser.

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