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Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

plasma-bigscreen.org

211–220 of 247 posts

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#211
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Garuda deploys plasma with vanity

What's Vanity?

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#212

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.

You can use an airmouse remote for that.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#213
post #81

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.

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…

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.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#214
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.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#215
post #185
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s an example: https://imgur.com/a/konsole-vs-ghostty-tR4Otmy Konsole on left, ghostty (which is gtk) on right. The latter has at least 3 additional lines visible outputting the same command. The giant copy paste buttons, tab bar which wastes a ton of space, are typical of kde apps. The klutter isn’t just visually annoying it makes the apps less useful.

Honestly this is the only complaint I agree with. KDE plasma desktop and its configurability looks and feels great... but all their in house actual windowed applications like Konsole and Kate are mediocre at best. All that duplicated effort seems wasteful.

I wonder how much QT has to do with this. AFAIK the only _decent_ bindings are still C++ and Python. For KDE it might just be C++?

There's plenty of valid criticism of GTK but choosing C over C++ isn't one of them. It seems like there is a new Rust GTK app every week, and other languages as well, thanks to the availability of bindings.

I'm curious how long relying on C++ contributions is going to last.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#216
post #169
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very annoyed if every screenshot I took was saved. I often take dozens of screenshots per day, and I save one maybe once a month. That means my screenshots folder only has meaningful entries. If everything was saved, I'd have to clean it up all the time. There might be a small misunderstanding regarding the "dialog". Once you've selected an area you're shown the outlines & can still modify them, and the bu…

> I often take dozens of screenshots per day, and I save one maybe once a month Sounds borderline implausible. If anything, that's not a typical user user case by far.

> Sounds borderline implausible.

Okay? Weird comment.

> If anything, that's not a typical user user case by far.

The scale may not be typical, but the pattern (many more screenshots copied to clipboard than saved as a file) is something I see across all kinds of users around me, be they technical or even very much non-technical.

Let's not turn the defaults into "The Homer", okay? Allowing the user to choose their preferred action in the same step as allowing them to change the outline doesn't make things unnecessarily confusing, doesn't add unnecessary clicks, or anything else.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#217
post #18

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.

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 :)

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#218
post #18

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 M…

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.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#219
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora are two solid distros I've been running for a few years now.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

#220
post #136

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.

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