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Comments (78)

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  sho_hn
  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.
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  olivierestsage
  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.
• akshatjiwan
  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.
• klinstar
  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.
• ehnto
  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.
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  DiJu519
  What kind of "Remote" would one use to mimic say an Android TV box or normal cable company Set-Top experience?
• godelski
  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
• em3rgent0rdr
  Too bad can't access $CorpStreamingVideoService full-resolution on linux :(
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  socalgal2
  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?
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  while_true_
  "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.
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  cromka
  If this can run AndroidTV apps (don't see why it couldn't), then it can be a hit.
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  9dc
  but it will be hard to play DRM protected media, eg Netflix on a device like this, right?
• jcelerier
  I'm really wondering about what is that ASIO4ALL uninstaller doing in there
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  himata4113
  "Built on Modern Linux Technologies"> D-busalright!on a more serious note, should remove that incase that was put there by AI.
• whateverboat
  KDE is the best DE out there.
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  kingo55
  Are there existing alternatives to this? I use KDE, but I have also heard Steam OS has something similar.
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  pixelmelt
  Wow this is big, what's the best device/remote stack to use it with?
• anon
  undefined
• cromka
  So... Steam TV Box confirmed?
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  amelius
  Now we only need a TV that doesn't send screenshots back to the vendor.
• shablulman
  [dead]
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  functionmouse
  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.