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Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

plasma-bigscreen.org

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

#91

Post by shevy-java »

Oanid wrote: post #81
olivierestsage wrote: post #7

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 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...

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

#92

Post by shevy-java »

vrighter wrote: post #88
Oanid wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

so just.... don't reconfigure it?

If the defaults work: sure. Do they, though?

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.

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

#93

Post by bigstrat2003 »

shevy-java wrote: post #92
vrighter wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so just.... don't reconfigure it?

If the defaults work: sure. Do they, though? 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…

Yes, they do. I've used Plasma on a couple of computers for a while, and the defaults have always been fine for me.

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

#94

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

AnonHP wrote: post #62
olivierestsage wrote: post #7

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.

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.

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

#95

Post by bpye »

AnonHP wrote: post #62
olivierestsage wrote: post #7

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.

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.

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.

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

#96

Post by socalgal2 »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #27
socalgal2 wrote: post #21

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…

Claude ?

Thanks for the push. It worked.

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

#97

Post by freshnode »

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?

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

#98

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

himata4113 wrote: post #67
kingo55 wrote: post #17

Are there existing alternatives to this? I use KDE, but I have also heard Steam OS has something similar.

steamos is just kde.

SteamOS uses KDE for their "desktop" session, but does their own thing for the normal gaming mode.

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

#99

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

sho_hn wrote: 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.

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:)

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

#100

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

freshnode wrote: post #97

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.
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