KDE Plasma 5.26 Beta Released With New "Plasma Bigscreen" Interface For TVs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma 5.26 Beta Released With New "Plasma Bigscreen" Interface For TVs

The KDE community has today released the beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.26 desktop...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-5.26-Beta

[mirmirmir]

Now that we have phone mode, TV mode, it's time for kiosk mode, let's goooo...

[hamishmb]

Conceptually makes me think of Steam's Big Picture mode.

[some_canuck]

KDE Connect has had a bigscreen plugin for a while, but I never knew what it did... maybe this is what it's for...

[V1tol]

Ah yes, long awaited Biggus Screenus mode. Who needs Breeze theming for Qt6 apps, right?

[NeoMorpheus]

KDE seems to be doing a lot more positive work than Gnome. I wonder if that might be why Valve went with them with Steam OS3.

[Awesomeness]

Plasma Bigscreen has the Aura Browser optimized for the large displays

YET ANOTHER WEB BROWSER AT KDE? WTF? Falkon and Angelfish aren't enough? Especially Angelfish has three different GUIs already (mobile, tablet, and desktop). Adding a TV GUI to that should be more beneficial than creating another browser. At least that would increase the chance of one somewhat fully featured browser which I prefer over three barebones ones.

[Chugworth]

KDE seems to be doing a lot more positive work than Gnome. I wonder if that might be why Valve went with them with Steam OS3.

I think it's because KDE Plasma is basically the more sensible desktop. It has a layout that's familiar to Windows users and offers a huge amount of customization to let you configure it exactly how you want it.

Gnome on the other hand gives you an interface that's not familiar to anyone, and seems obsessed with making you use the desktop exactly the way they want you to. It seems like they would rather remove customization abilities instead of add them.

And also let's not forget, KDE Plasma is the only desktop interface that comes with the essential wobbly window feature included.

[Awesomeness]

Gnome on the other hand gives you an interface that's not familiar to anyone, and seems obsessed with making you use the desktop exactly the way they want you to. It seems like they would rather remove customization abilities instead of add them.

Funny thing is that Gnome is literally just a single well maintained GS extensions and two mouse clicks in Gnome Tweaks away from being a somewhat traditional desktop – not full blown Win7 clone but the basics are close enough that any convert would not be completely confused (this still features Gnome's default full screen app launcher, etc. but that's more on the level of "huh, that's a bit different" and not "holy sh*t, WTF is happening?!?" like Gnome's default).

Gnome Shell is actually quite nice and fully configurable via extensions, it's just the ego of the Gnome applications developers and the vocal part of their community that's unbearable.

[JEBjames]

Michael

Grammar/typo

"Plasma Bigscreen has the Aura Browser optimized for the large displays" should be "Plasma Bigscreen has the Aura Browser optimized for large displays" (no the).