Plasma Bigscreen continues to develop, but is it worth it?

Bigscreen Plasma

A few hours ago, KDE has released plasma 5.26, and among its novelties there has been a mention of Bigscreen Plasma. In fact, there have been two, if we count separately each of the new applications to reach our screens. On the one hand, they have launched Plank Player, a player; on the other, Aura, a web browser. Both are designed to be easier to use with a controller, and that is one of the reasons for this image or "skin" for Plasma.

Some time ago I made my old Lenovo my “TV Box”. I have Ubuntu 22.04 and Windows 11 on it. I would prefer to use Ubuntu for gaming and media viewing, but Kodi has decided not to work as it should since its upload to Matrix, and that's where the Windows 11 partition comes into play; I use it for what Ubuntu does not allow me. Recently I have taken to looking at the work of KonstaKANG, and developer that brings to the Raspberry Pi (among others) Android, and in its latest releases, in addition, in AOSP version.

Plasma Bigscreen reminds Plasma Mobile

But what does the above have to do with Plasma Bigscreen? The moment. Right now, when I am in a sea of ​​doubts about what is best for my use, KDE has reminded us that its Bigscreen exists, so I have decided to try it again. The first surprise, and not a very good one, was to see that KDE neon based image no longer available. The bad impression has given me an idea, or rather a question: does KDE trust its proposal for large screens so little that it no longer releases the version based on the operating system that they control the most? But it is also true that KDE is in every corner, the last to get into Valve's Steam Deck.

Overcome the first surprise, it touched me choose between postmarketOS and Manjaro. Those are the two projects that appear when entering the “Install” section on the official “Big Screen” page. Taking into account that I have already used Manjaro on the Raspberry Pi, and that the images are more like what I know, my choice has been clear. So I pop an SD into the adapter, everything into my laptop's card slot, and "flash" it with Imager to make sure everything turns out the best it can (and avoid blaming someone who doesn't have it if something goes wrong). wrong).

I boot up my 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 and what I see is really fine. It is very reminiscent of what we see on a tablet and other television operating systems, but at the same time it is different. Yes it looks a lot like Plasma Mobile, for example, when opening an application, which appears as a splash screen with the icon and a background color, which depends on the app. It has also reminded me of the mobile version of Plasma that I have not found a way to change the language.

So is it worth it?

Plasma Bigscreen has a good design, and I haven't been able to use the voice interaction option because I don't have compatible hardware. But you have to know what you need and what use you are going to make of a device like the Raspberry Pi. That it's not in Spanish doesn't help to go with Bigscreen, but that would be less of an issue if it weren't for the options available.

For example in hardware we can use Plasma Bigscreen we can also use Manjaro ARM, see it in Spanish and install everything, only losing out if what we want is to use only one command. We also have Twister OS, with which we can have all kinds of "themes" and easily overclock the board to improve its performance. And we must not forget Android, which is being developed by KonstaKANG and which allows us to have a tablet-like Android that currently only lacks support for hardware acceleration.

So, answering the question, I think right now there are better options, but things may change in the future, especially if we use a controller or pull KDE Connect to control everything without using a full keyboard, which, even if it is wireless, is less comfortable. Even so, if you don't forget the most important thing, which is the version for computers, from here I encourage you to continue. There are almost never too many options.


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