Plasma Bigscreen is KDE’s UI running on smart TVs

Mar 27, 2020 05:37 GMT  ·  By

KDE has just announced Plasma Bigscreen, a new project that brings its very own user interface to smart TVs with all the typical bells and whistles that such a device requires, including media-rich apps.

But the main benefit of using Plasma Bigscreen on a smart TV is the support for traditional desktop applications, which can fit the larger screen just perfectly.

A beta version coming soon will allow users to try out Plasma Bigscreen using a Raspberry Pi 4, and KDE says the whole thing is supposed to run on a large screen, but you can give it a try on a regular monitor as well just fine.

And of course, since everything’s built for smart TVs, you can very well control the interface with a remote control.

“There is experimental support for HDMI-CEC in the beta image, so anyone with a TV that supports HDMI-CEC can choose to use their TV remotes,” KDE says.

Open source

KDE Plasma Bigscreen also comes with voice control, which technically means that you can control the interface with voice commands. At this point, the system relies on the Mycroft Open Source voice assistant to do this, so a connection to Mycroft’s Home server is needed. In turn, this system relies on Google’s STT, or Speech to text, so some data is obviously sent to Google.

“This, of course, is not ideal, but being Open Source, you can switch out the back end and use whatever you want, even self-hosted systems like Mozilla Deepspeech. Or you can de-activate voice recognition altogether. Your choice,” KDE explains.

Of course, Plasma Bigscreen comes as open-source software, so it’s completely free for everyone and developers can make their own changes to the code.

KDE promises that additional skills and apps would be added in the coming future, especially as the whole project was designed from the very beginning to be easy to expand.

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