KDE Plasma 5.26 Beta arrives with a TV environment, improvements and more

plasma-bigscreen

Plasma Bigscreen is a user interface for television.

Announced the launch of the new beta version of KDE Plasma 5.26 which is already available for testing and in which it stands out because implements a "Plasma Bigscreen" environment, specially optimized for big TV screens and control without keyboard via remote controls and voice assistant.

The voice assistant is based on the developments of the Mycroft project and uses the Selene voice interface for control, and the Google STT or Mozilla DeepSpeech engine for voice recognition. In addition to KDE programs, Mycroft multimedia applications are supported. The environment can be used to equip set-top boxes and smart TVs.

The composition also includes several components developed by the Bigscreen project, such as:

  • The Plasma Remotecontrollers suite, which translates specialized input device events into keyboard and mouse events. It supports both the use of conventional television infrared remote controls (support is implemented using the libCEC library) and game consoles with a Bluetooth interface, such as the Nintendo Wiimote and Wii Plus.
  • To navigate the global web, the Aura web browser based on the Chromium engine is used. The browser offers a simple interface optimized for browsing websites using the TV's remote control. There is support for tabs, bookmarks and browsing history.
  • To listen to music and watch videos, the Plank Player media player is being developed, which allows you to play files from a local file system.

Another novelty that this new version presents is that the component KPipewire to allow using the Flatpak package with the PipeWire media server in Plasma.

Another notable change is in Discover, which implemented a content classification visualization for apps and added a “Share” button to transfer information about the app. The ability to configure the frequency of notifications about the availability of updates is provided. When submitting a review, you are allowed to choose a different username.

The size of the widgets (plasmoids) on the panel can now be switched by analogy with windows ordinary by stretching over the edge or corner. The changed size is remembered. Many plasmoids have improved support for people with disabilities.

In the configurator, desktop wallpaper preview is simplified (clicking on the wallpaper in the list now shows its temporary display instead of the current wallpaper).

Added support for wallpapers with different images for dark and light color schemes, as well as the ability to apply animated images to wallpapers and display a series of images in the form of a slideshow.

Of the other changes that stand out from this beta version:

  • The number of applets that support keyboard navigation has been expanded.
  • When you start typing in overview mode, the entered text is used as a mask for window filtering.
  • Added the ability to redefine buttons for multi-button mice.
  • Continuous improvement of the session based on the Wayland protocol.
  • Implemented the ability to disable pasting from the clipboard with the middle mouse button and to set the mapping of the graphics tablet input area to screen coordinates. To avoid blurring, a choice is provided: scale the app using the composite manager or the app itself.
  • The Kickoff app menu has a new compact mode (“Compact”, not used by default) that allows you to display more menu items at the same time.
  • By placing the menu in a horizontal panel, it is possible to display only text without icons.
  • In the general list of all applications, support has been added to filter applications by the first letter of the name.

Finally, if you are interested in being able to know more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.


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