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posted by martyb on Saturday March 28 2020, @04:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-is-there-any-program-worth-watching dept.

Plasma Bigscreen Is A New Smart TV Experience Powered By Raspberry Pi 4 And KDE

Want to turn your dumb TV into a smart one? Or maybe you'd prefer to have a more privacy respecting, open source operating system powering your TV experience? Just take one part KDE Plasma, one part Rasbperry Pi 4, and one part Mycroft AI voice assistant, and you've got Plasma Bigscreen. It's a new venture that transforms the KDE Linux desktop into a "10 foot experience" using the speed and flexibility of KDE Neon, complete with voice control and Alexa-like assistant skills.

Smart TVs are becoming more and more complete computers, but unfortunately there the experience tends to be a tight walled garden between proprietary platform, services and privacy-infringing features. Features which are very cool, like voice control, but in order to not pose a threat to the user privacy should be on a free software stack and depending less on proprietary cloud platforms where possible. -- Plasma Bigscreen developer Marco Marin

Plasma Bigscreen is just entering Beta, and is currently available to download and install on the Raspberry Pi 4. On paper, it looks incredible promising for a few reasons:

Other features include: Privacy-focused (i.e., locally-processed) voice control as well as free (as in beer and as in libre) open source software that can be controlled with a remote or mouse/keyboard. Further, security updates are more likely to be created and made available with a popular operating system and browser.

If it is truly controllable by the user, then it could be turned into a "dumb" TV which would be deprived of some advertising.


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  • (Score: 2) by epitaxial on Saturday March 28 2020, @08:12PM (3 children)

    by epitaxial (3165) on Saturday March 28 2020, @08:12PM (#976739)

    I always rolled my own "smart" tv with a mini PC running Linux. Everything runs fine in the browser and its much more responsive than those cheap Android based boxes. Buy one of those really tiny Lenovos with an i3 and wifi. Add a $20 SSD and it flies.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @09:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @09:30PM (#976750)

    What software do you use for the TV/media?

  • (Score: 1) by petecox on Saturday March 28 2020, @09:39PM

    by petecox (3228) on Saturday March 28 2020, @09:39PM (#976751)

    Little about this project would prevent you from running it your Lenovo nettop connected to a TV.

    KDE Neon is just a rolling distro on top of Ubuntu LTS.