Devin Lin announced the continuation of the development of the project Plasma Bigscreen, which is a user interface based on KDE technologies designed for multimedia devices connected to TVs and projectors. The environment is optimized for large screens and can be controlled without a keyboard using a remote control or voice assistant.
The project was actively developing in 2020 but later fell into stagnation and did not transition to KDE Plasma 6 as it was not updated to use KDE 6 libraries and Qt 6. It was also tied to the voting assistant Mycroft that ceased to exist. Along with Plasma Bigscreen, related projects such as the Web browser Aura and multimedia player Plank were being developed to support navigation using a television remote control.
In September of last year, Plasma Bigscreen was translated to KDE 6 and QT 6 technology, but the publication of new issues was not renewed, leading to the project being abandoned once again.
A couple of months ago, several developers decided to revive the project and worked on modernizing the interface and finalizing the configurator. The interface underwent changes such as adopting a flat style, removing shadows and background panels, and adding indicator tips. Large screen clocks were implemented, and the ListView QML type was used for list display with caching for element drawing. Background objects that are not in focus were also enhanced.
Comparison of the old interface:
Comparison of the new interface:
The search function based on Krunner has been implemented, allowing users to find applications without manually scrolling through a full list of applications.