Plasma Bigscreen rises from the dead with a better UI
neowin.net
neowin.net
I would love an Arch or Debian based distro powering my TV streaming apparatus. In the meantime, I'll continue to use Apple TV since I'm in that ecosystem already, bit I'm always open for a true Linux TV experience if someone makes a small form factor Linux for TV device that lets me SSH into it if I really want to, but contains all the eye candy of a TV OS.
Any issue for streaming DRM content like netflix, or decoding high nitrate h265?
Thank you !
I don't use fancy GUI media centers or anything, just a standard Debian XFCE desktop scaled up. Netflix and Hulu work just fine in Chrome and Firefox. No idea about 2k+ performance due to 1080p limit. TV for me is mostly background noise so media quality is of no concern to me.
My only gripe is once in a rare while the audio goes to shit and continually crackles but reboot and its fixed.
Android TV sticks scare me, but the Apple TV seems... okay.
In fact needing to access a streaming service, instead of a local server, sounds like a feature people don't need, even if it would be nice.
1. Takes a lot more time. 2. Costs _a lot_ more money than streaming services. 3. Is _often_ illegal.
You could say price shouldn't be an issue here, if we're talking about morals, but a single season on BLU-RAY of shows can easily cost ~70 USD (at least here in Denmark), compared to a ~10 USD streaming service. The idea is, of course that the largest fans and collectors are willing to purchase these, but it's not doable for replacing a streaming flow. So practically, it's a large consideration.
And principally I really can't blame pirates when they get their stuff, cheaper, better, faster and more easily. Again, Steam represents a nice counter-balance, Steam is much easier, while still being very affordable, than pirating. I haven't pirated a game in 10 years, even for studios who I would rather not have my money (Disco Elysium), I still purchased the game on sale, just for the convenience.
Vote with your wallet and dollars.
Sail the high seas.
I'd prefer one of the immutable variants for that kind of appliance device. My personal bias is toward OpenSUSE MicroOS, but Debian or Arch based would also be good. (That doesn't mean you can't ssh in, just that there are more guardrails and the system can better self-maintain by default.)
Atomic distros would do it for me I think. Something very stable.
Course atomic distros make me think of Debian more than anything ;)
What's interesting to me in retrospect is how this might have been an intentional stepping stone on the way to the Steam Deck; they got to dip their toes in hardware at a time when the company didn't have much experience in it, as well as a lot more testing data for their controller support that would become an important part of how users interact with the Steam Deck. When I first got a Steam Deck, I realized how many years they probably had been planning something like this given all of the long-term bets like this that it capitalized on (heavy investment into Linux gaming being another big one). It took me until their more recent official support for other handheld gaming devices on SteamOS to consider that if they planned that far ahead for the Steam Deck, there's no reason that wouldn't have to be their ultimate end-goal, and they could have similarly long-term plans still in motion that the Steam Deck itself could just be a stepping stone to. My current theory is that they might not even care about being in hardware in the long run as much as making SteamOS the de facto default for the emerging market of "handheld desktop" gaming consoles (or whatever the term is for devices like the Steam Deck). I could easily imagine that getting the Steam Deck out first as an established player being a strategy to try to prevent what presumably would otherwise be a Microsoft-dominated future for the market in the same way that they've been basically the only player in traditional desktop gaming systems for so long, and using Microsoft's own playbook to do it by just providing the OS and not the hardware. Interestingly, the Steam Deck is remarkably open to being used pretty much however I want (i.e. giving me a full-fledged desktop mode where I can install whatever I want and letting me set up games I didn't get from Steam to run in the more streamlined gaming mode in the exact same way I already do it on my Linux desktops), so my perception is that in the long run they're expecting for the investments to pay off in terms of the revenue from game purchases made by users of these devices, since buying from Steam is still the most streamlined option even though playing games from anywhere else is still supported. Considering the fringe benefits all this has had in terms of making Linux desktop gaming a pretty viable alternative nowadays and that their support for using the hardware however I want is better than what the vendors of the existing major players in mobile devices offer today, it's hard for me to be unhappy with the idea of a future where this plan succeeds.
If people still use the 10 foot UI despite the bad remote, I think the 10 foot UI must be the right idea. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure apple will never share those usage stats with us.
It was a neat concept but I always found it annoying to have to keep going back to the app to control it when I was doing something else, or keep a tab open in my web browser, and it would often disconnect the session so no one could control it without just stopping and restarting entirely.
You can still use that interaction model on the newer Chromecast-branded devices but they're also full-fat Android TV devices that can be used standalone with a dedicated remote control and run actual apps, which I think is a nice balance.
If you can not figure out how to boot a raspberry pi or another micro computer with this, you should not be using it. There is a base technical competency required to run any Linux distro and being able to flash an image to an SD card and boot from it is part of that basic tech literacy.
If anything, things seem to have regressed slightly, since Steam removed the one good 10ft browser I'm aware of during the Steam Deck rollout.
Would be great if you could choose a shell like Mobile or Bigscreen that is designed for being used without a mouse.
Anyway a big flaw with custom smart TV OSes is that you won't ever get proper support for commercial services like Netflix and Prime. You can't even use Android apparently because it needs widevine nonsense that only commercial Android versions have.
Are their public stats somewhere?
> As of right now, Plasma Bigscreen isn't available for public use yet. This is due to not being developed for so long. The project has been revived, but it might take a while until it becomes stable and is available for public use.
Here are some recent developments:
1. https://plasma-mobile.org/2025/07/08/releases-25-07/ (also explaining that most software is part of 'Plasma Gear', which makes sense as it is software for both mobile and desktop, but has the downside of making Mobile less visible)
2. https://blogs.kde.org/2025/07/05/this-week-in-plasma-chuggin... and look for Plasma Keyboard in this post. (Personally I am a bit sad that they are seemingly abandoning Maliit, which is also used in Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch and is IMHO fine, but hey, at least it shows that Mobile is not dead.)
Here you go: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/
>Can I run Plasma Bigscreen on my TV or setup-box?
>In theory, yes. In practice, it depends.
>Hardware support is not dictated by Plasma Bigscreen, instead it depends on the devices supported by the distributions shipping it. See the install page for more details of distributions shipping Plasma Bigscreen.
If this can get some of the missing pieces sorted (like input from a remote, and a decent onscreen keyboard that works with it), it could be pretty decent.
I could imagine using some Android TV apps with this via waydroid.
The first screenshot of the home screen in the article made me retch. But also, the KDE _default_ desktop has an equally weird design, so this is not really an exception.
You have your GNOME and simmilar ilk, be content with that and leave KDE alone.