KDE just made a debut on your TV
KDE's Bigscreen project is finally debuting as part of Plasma 6.7, out this week. It's built for use on a big-screen TV and purportedly has many compatible apps.
KDE's official Mastodon account today pointed out that buried in the release notes for KDE Plasma 6.7, which just released this week, was the first appearance of "Bigscreen." It allows switching your Plasma desktop to a TV-friendly interface.
A treat for Plasma 6.7 updaters
On floss.social, a Mastodon instance for discussion of free, libre, and open source software, the KDE project posted a short remark about Bigscreen, a link to the Plasma 6.7 release notes, and screenshots of the Bigscreen experience.
KDE
As you can tell by date shown in the screenshots, the images are several months old. They date from when KDE developer Devin Lin wrote about reviving the project after it had been essentially abandoned. He made strides in improving the experience, but at the time, availability was limited.
Since then, Bigscreen has been making its way to the big KDE release: Plasma 6.7. Once you have that version of Plasma installed, switching to Bigscreen it seems will be trivial.
As far as what you can do when you're there, reportedly quite a bit. I haven't tried it myself, but KDE's documentation says that many apps in the KDE ecosystem are already TV-friendly.
There are quite a few TV-optimized apps that are now being bundled with the various distributions, allowing a wide range of basic functions. These are mostly built with Kirigami, KDE’s interface framework allowing convergent UIs that work very well in a TV remote-only environment.
From what I've seen, this likely includes the Dolphin file browser, Jellyfin, and Firefox (or at least KDE's browser, Konquerer). Being able to browse the web on your TV is pretty nice.
Zooming out
Why this announcement matters: The smart TV world is currently dominated by Android and closed source operating systems developed by the big TV and streaming stick manufacturers. Some alternatives like Kodi exist, but they take technical know-how to install and operate. Being able to comfortably interact with any Linux distribution running the user-friendly KDE Plasma on a living room TV is a win for the FOSS community.
Jordan Gloor
My take: I'm looking forward to trying this on a stable Linux distribution installed on a small PC. If I can replace my aging Chromecast streaming stick with KDE, I will.
Diving in
Go further: You can read more about KDE Bigscreen on the official Bigscreen website or, for more technical information, on the Bigscreen GitLab repository.
Get it now: You can refer to the official Bigscreen installation instructions to get started. At the moment, they state that you can get it through KDE Development releases, through PostmarketOS (a distribution designed for smartphones and other Arm devices), or by waiting for the arrival of Plasma 6.7. If you have a rolling release distribution, you'll likely get the 6.7 update
