A good television interface is certainly still missing on Linux. Now you either choose Android TV (which doesn’t run nicely with x86), or Steam big screen (which is missing the more media parts). But with very powerful and affordable mini PCs that can play games and media (with latest codecs), it would be much more interesting to have a great user interface that combines media watching and gaming.
The biggest thing they need to do is find a vendor that will sell devices with this on it, then figure out which Distro to set it up with.
I would love an Arch or Debian based distro powering my TV streaming apparatus. In the meantime, I'll continue to use Apple TV since I'm in that ecosystem already, bit I'm always open for a true Linux TV experience if someone makes a small form factor Linux for TV device that lets me SSH into it if I really want to, but contains all the eye candy of a TV OS.
> I would love an Arch or Debian based distro powering my TV streaming apparatus.
I'd prefer one of the immutable variants for that kind of appliance device. My personal bias is toward OpenSUSE MicroOS, but Debian or Arch based would also be good. (That doesn't mean you can't ssh in, just that there are more guardrails and the system can better self-maintain by default.)
Immutable is a new part of the distro world for me I kind of want to like it but last time I tried to setup one of those Atomic distros it didnt really work for me, I appreciate them for what they are but it made me realize what I personally wanted was Arch, bleeding edge so I always have up to date software.
Atomic distros would do it for me I think. Something very stable.
Course atomic distros make me think of Debian more than anything ;)
Atomic and update speed are orthogonal. And ex. https://blendos.co/ and https://arkanelinux.org/ are atomic Arch derivatives if that's your speed. (Not explicitly endorsing either, but they're there.)
Being an https://getaurora.dev (Universal Blue based) user I don't notice updates at all. I don't update, updates happen in the background. What difference does "speed" make them?
I have an AMD APU Linux PC hooked to my TV with a Logitech K400. Its a bit more fiddly than a throw away android based TV stick thing but you have complete freedom and control.
I watch everything on my web browser with a fancy OLED monitor. The problem is that many services won't give you even HD, let alone UHD. I'm stuck at 480p for renting movies on YouTube.
Android TV sticks scare me, but the Apple TV seems... okay.
Ryzen 5 4600G on an ITX board with 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe and hard-wired gigabit. It's hooked to a ~40 inch Sony 1080p dumb TV via HDMI.
I don't use fancy GUI media centers or anything, just a standard Debian XFCE desktop scaled up. Netflix and Hulu work just fine in Chrome and Firefox. No idea about 2k+ performance due to 1080p limit. TV for me is mostly background noise so media quality is of no concern to me.
My only gripe is once in a rare while the audio goes to shit and continually crackles but reboot and its fixed.
I am halfway convinced the idea of a "10 foot ui" driven by a remote is... well not wrong, but perhaps we could do better. Have the big screen be for just that, a spot to display video. Have the remote control, with the entire UI, be on a phone. I would keep the interface as a web interface so you don't have to screw around with an app to make it work, and include collaborative features so everyone gets to fight^wshare over what is shown.
Would be nice if valve released a steamOS box, steam big picture for gaming/game-streaming and Plasma big screen for other media. Like you know can use the plasma desktop on steam deck.
The problem is, any streaming device that's not fully locked down and blessed by the holy gods themselves (i.e. iPhone, un-rooted Android, Fire TV, Chromecast 4K, Apple TV) will not be able to get more than 720p/1080p quality. The streaming providers are really really nasty about that, no matter that enough ways exist to dump any and all shows in full quality anyway.
At this point, I think pirating is more moral than actually paying for your digital media. The digital media scene for shows/movies is so incredibly hostile to consumers that not giving them money feels like the moral position. I don't feel it's necessarily the case for music (Qobuz) and especially games (GOG, hell even Steam). Not sure on books since I mostly read blogs, scientific articles (that definitely _should_ be pirated) and freely available math/crypto texts.
Owning and running a local media server at home doesn’t automatically make one a pirate, there is free content and some laws allow for ripping and streaming your copy to your tv or other device.
There is not a lot of free content out there comparatively. As for ripping yourself, that's fine, but usually it's:
1. Takes a lot more time.
2. Costs _a lot_ more money than streaming services.
3. Is _often_ illegal.
You could say price shouldn't be an issue here, if we're talking about morals, but a single season on BLU-RAY of shows can easily cost ~70 USD (at least here in Denmark), compared to a ~10 USD streaming service. The idea is, of course that the largest fans and collectors are willing to purchase these, but it's not doable for replacing a streaming flow. So practically, it's a large consideration.
And principally I really can't blame pirates when they get their stuff, cheaper, better, faster and more easily. Again, Steam represents a nice counter-balance, Steam is much easier, while still being very affordable, than pirating. I haven't pirated a game in 10 years, even for studios who I would rather not have my money (Disco Elysium), I still purchased the game on sale, just for the convenience.
This is great news. I am currently using regular Plasma on a mini pc with my TV, but it would be great having an optimized interface. That being said, without apps also being optimized, it would not be that significant of an improvement.
Nice! I currently run KDE on my HTPC, and I might give this a try. I hope it allows playing media with external players like mpv, instead of having its own media player. A way of loading remote libraries would also be welcome.
Oh this is wonderful news. I had stumbled upon Plasma Bigscreen a few years ago, and while it looked like exactly what I wanted, development was pretty dead. I shall have to take a look at running it again, it would be great as a Roku alternative
I had a similar question. After a bit of perusing, it isn't immediately clear (especially since the install page just has a message saying it's not yet available to the public). But the following FAQ seems to suggest that it will run directly on the TV:
>Can I run Plasma Bigscreen on my TV or setup-box?
>In theory, yes. In practice, it depends.
>Hardware support is not dictated by Plasma Bigscreen, instead it depends on the devices supported by the distributions shipping it. See the install page for more details of distributions shipping Plasma Bigscreen.
I don't understand why so many TV interfaces waste the top half of the screen with nothing...
Anyway a big flaw with custom smart TV OSes is that you won't ever get proper support for commercial services like Netflix and Prime. You can't even use Android apparently because it needs widevine nonsense that only commercial Android versions have.
Not nothing, Google TV manages to fill it with a carousel of three lovely big adverts for shows you may not want members of your family to see or for networks you're not even subscribed to
If you can run your own Linux version on your TV, it can run on-device as well. Unfortunately not many TV manufacturers release usable Linux sources for their TVs even though they probably should be doing that.
How does this work? You write an ISO file on a USB stick and plug it into a TV? Or do you need something like an Amazon Fire TV stick with an HDMI plug? Does this project have a GitHub repo?
This is just an interface for a Linux distribution. You would still need a computer plugged into the TV to run it on. I use a Beelink mini PC with mine, but I have not tried this interface yet.
They do, but they always use that weird design by default on KDE Plasma. It's a concious decision to go with those weird margins and spacing between elements
The first screenshot of the home screen in the article made me retch. But also, the KDE _default_ desktop has an equally weird design, so this is not really an exception.
currently using a NEC billboard with an OPS module and linux mint (not ideal, when the monitor connection sleeps, the audio turns off). This could be good, especially now that there are a dearth of 1.6b small models that could probably run on the SFP's APU (though I could be wrong)
> As of right now, Plasma Bigscreen isn't available for public use yet. This is due to not being developed for so long. The project has been revived, but it might take a while until it becomes stable and is available for public use.
It did not get far in market share, sure, but it never stopped going like Big Screen did and made the transition to 6 at the same time as Plasma Desktop.
Here are some recent developments:
1. https://plasma-mobile.org/2025/07/08/releases-25-07/
(also explaining that most software is part of 'Plasma Gear', which makes sense as it is software for both mobile and desktop, but has the downside of making Mobile less visible)
2. https://blogs.kde.org/2025/07/05/this-week-in-plasma-chuggin... and look for Plasma Keyboard in this post.
(Personally I am a bit sad that they are seemingly abandoning Maliit, which is also used in Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch and is IMHO fine, but hey, at least it shows that Mobile is not dead.)
I have an Android TV and its pretty disappointing.
If this can get some of the missing pieces sorted (like input from a remote, and a decent onscreen keyboard that works with it), it could be pretty decent.
I could imagine using some Android TV apps with this via waydroid.
The desktop shell feels out of place on tablet+controller devices like the Steam Deck.
Would be great if you could choose a shell like Mobile or Bigscreen that is designed for being used without a mouse.
A good television interface is certainly still missing on Linux. Now you either choose Android TV (which doesn’t run nicely with x86), or Steam big screen (which is missing the more media parts). But with very powerful and affordable mini PCs that can play games and media (with latest codecs), it would be much more interesting to have a great user interface that combines media watching and gaming.
Kodi, which is capable of rendering directly to a framebuffer (underlying desktop env not required) is pretty good at media parts.
The biggest thing they need to do is find a vendor that will sell devices with this on it, then figure out which Distro to set it up with.
I would love an Arch or Debian based distro powering my TV streaming apparatus. In the meantime, I'll continue to use Apple TV since I'm in that ecosystem already, bit I'm always open for a true Linux TV experience if someone makes a small form factor Linux for TV device that lets me SSH into it if I really want to, but contains all the eye candy of a TV OS.
> I would love an Arch or Debian based distro powering my TV streaming apparatus.
I'd prefer one of the immutable variants for that kind of appliance device. My personal bias is toward OpenSUSE MicroOS, but Debian or Arch based would also be good. (That doesn't mean you can't ssh in, just that there are more guardrails and the system can better self-maintain by default.)
Immutable is a new part of the distro world for me I kind of want to like it but last time I tried to setup one of those Atomic distros it didnt really work for me, I appreciate them for what they are but it made me realize what I personally wanted was Arch, bleeding edge so I always have up to date software.
Atomic distros would do it for me I think. Something very stable.
Course atomic distros make me think of Debian more than anything ;)
Atomic and update speed are orthogonal. And ex. https://blendos.co/ and https://arkanelinux.org/ are atomic Arch derivatives if that's your speed. (Not explicitly endorsing either, but they're there.)
Being an https://getaurora.dev (Universal Blue based) user I don't notice updates at all. I don't update, updates happen in the background. What difference does "speed" make them?
I would not want to deal with anything and have a stable system so Fedora Atomics or a custom ublue image.
https://github.com/ublue-os/image-template.
I have an AMD APU Linux PC hooked to my TV with a Logitech K400. Its a bit more fiddly than a throw away android based TV stick thing but you have complete freedom and control.
Streaming platforms won't serve Linux desktops high resolution content, unfortunately. Been the case for like a decade
Thats what The Pirate Bay is for.
I watch everything on my web browser with a fancy OLED monitor. The problem is that many services won't give you even HD, let alone UHD. I'm stuck at 480p for renting movies on YouTube.
Android TV sticks scare me, but the Apple TV seems... okay.
I use an Apple TV w/ the Infuse app for Jellyfin. I pay for premium for it, and can watch media from my pi5 running Jellyfin/Sonarr etc.
Infuse is awesome. I use it with Plex/Sonarr, both on the Apple TV and the AVP.
DRM becoming so entrenched in the web still makes me sad beyond measure
Would you care to share the specs?
Any issue for streaming DRM content like netflix, or decoding high nitrate h265?
Thank you !
Ryzen 5 4600G on an ITX board with 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe and hard-wired gigabit. It's hooked to a ~40 inch Sony 1080p dumb TV via HDMI.
I don't use fancy GUI media centers or anything, just a standard Debian XFCE desktop scaled up. Netflix and Hulu work just fine in Chrome and Firefox. No idea about 2k+ performance due to 1080p limit. TV for me is mostly background noise so media quality is of no concern to me.
My only gripe is once in a rare while the audio goes to shit and continually crackles but reboot and its fixed.
An asrock deskmini would probably do. Anything zen2 or newer I'd be fine with personally.
Try KDE-Connect, you can send mouse in-out, change volume, open links, etc.
yep, k400 and a dell optiplex mini running debian with plasma. can stream, pull up youtube, cast to spotify, whatever. it rocks.
I am halfway convinced the idea of a "10 foot ui" driven by a remote is... well not wrong, but perhaps we could do better. Have the big screen be for just that, a spot to display video. Have the remote control, with the entire UI, be on a phone. I would keep the interface as a web interface so you don't have to screw around with an app to make it work, and include collaborative features so everyone gets to fight^wshare over what is shown.
You can already do this with KDE-Connect. Touchpad input, send text, change volume, open URLs. Works great on my Media PC in the living room.
Would be nice if valve released a steamOS box, steam big picture for gaming/game-streaming and Plasma big screen for other media. Like you know can use the plasma desktop on steam deck.
The problem is, any streaming device that's not fully locked down and blessed by the holy gods themselves (i.e. iPhone, un-rooted Android, Fire TV, Chromecast 4K, Apple TV) will not be able to get more than 720p/1080p quality. The streaming providers are really really nasty about that, no matter that enough ways exist to dump any and all shows in full quality anyway.
So don't pay the streaming providers if you want 4K.
Vote with your wallet and dollars.
Sail the high seas.
Just need to support media servers like Plex and Jellyfin at 4K.
In fact needing to access a streaming service, instead of a local server, sounds like a feature people don't need, even if it would be nice.
At this point, I think pirating is more moral than actually paying for your digital media. The digital media scene for shows/movies is so incredibly hostile to consumers that not giving them money feels like the moral position. I don't feel it's necessarily the case for music (Qobuz) and especially games (GOG, hell even Steam). Not sure on books since I mostly read blogs, scientific articles (that definitely _should_ be pirated) and freely available math/crypto texts.
Owning and running a local media server at home doesn’t automatically make one a pirate, there is free content and some laws allow for ripping and streaming your copy to your tv or other device.
There is not a lot of free content out there comparatively. As for ripping yourself, that's fine, but usually it's:
1. Takes a lot more time. 2. Costs _a lot_ more money than streaming services. 3. Is _often_ illegal.
You could say price shouldn't be an issue here, if we're talking about morals, but a single season on BLU-RAY of shows can easily cost ~70 USD (at least here in Denmark), compared to a ~10 USD streaming service. The idea is, of course that the largest fans and collectors are willing to purchase these, but it's not doable for replacing a streaming flow. So practically, it's a large consideration.
And principally I really can't blame pirates when they get their stuff, cheaper, better, faster and more easily. Again, Steam represents a nice counter-balance, Steam is much easier, while still being very affordable, than pirating. I haven't pirated a game in 10 years, even for studios who I would rather not have my money (Disco Elysium), I still purchased the game on sale, just for the convenience.
This is great news. I am currently using regular Plasma on a mini pc with my TV, but it would be great having an optimized interface. That being said, without apps also being optimized, it would not be that significant of an improvement.
Which distro do you use? :)
I am using Fedora Kinoite since I mostly just use Firefox on my TV, so the limitations of an atomic distribution are not relevant for my use case.
To me it would be relevant to my use case since a TV box is not something I tinker with or want to have to worry about updates.
Nice! I currently run KDE on my HTPC, and I might give this a try. I hope it allows playing media with external players like mpv, instead of having its own media player. A way of loading remote libraries would also be welcome.
Oh this is wonderful news. I had stumbled upon Plasma Bigscreen a few years ago, and while it looked like exactly what I wanted, development was pretty dead. I shall have to take a look at running it again, it would be great as a Roku alternative
Will it run on the tv hardware or a computer via hdmi?
I had a similar question. After a bit of perusing, it isn't immediately clear (especially since the install page just has a message saying it's not yet available to the public). But the following FAQ seems to suggest that it will run directly on the TV:
>Can I run Plasma Bigscreen on my TV or setup-box?
>In theory, yes. In practice, it depends.
>Hardware support is not dictated by Plasma Bigscreen, instead it depends on the devices supported by the distributions shipping it. See the install page for more details of distributions shipping Plasma Bigscreen.
cec in x86 is basically not working. in arm maybe
I don't understand why so many TV interfaces waste the top half of the screen with nothing...
Anyway a big flaw with custom smart TV OSes is that you won't ever get proper support for commercial services like Netflix and Prime. You can't even use Android apparently because it needs widevine nonsense that only commercial Android versions have.
Not nothing, Google TV manages to fill it with a carousel of three lovely big adverts for shows you may not want members of your family to see or for networks you're not even subscribed to
I am pretty sure most netflix subscribers don't pay for the 4k enabled subscription anyway.
Are their public stats somewhere?
Perfect timing. Was just about to redo my linux set top box (a beelink mini PC with Arch on it). Fucking pumped to try this out.
So is this something that is run on an external computer, using the TV for the display, or something else?
If you can run your own Linux version on your TV, it can run on-device as well. Unfortunately not many TV manufacturers release usable Linux sources for their TVs even though they probably should be doing that.
Yes, it's a nice user interface to run on a computer that works well on a TV screen.
I haven't found anything more reliable and performant than a nVidia Shield Pro plus Kodi
How does this work? You write an ISO file on a USB stick and plug it into a TV? Or do you need something like an Amazon Fire TV stick with an HDMI plug? Does this project have a GitHub repo?
> Does this project have a GitHub repo?
Here you go: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/
This is just an interface for a Linux distribution. You would still need a computer plugged into the TV to run it on. I use a Beelink mini PC with mine, but I have not tried this interface yet.
do you have a designer on the team?
They do, but they always use that weird design by default on KDE Plasma. It's a concious decision to go with those weird margins and spacing between elements
+1
The first screenshot of the home screen in the article made me retch. But also, the KDE _default_ desktop has an equally weird design, so this is not really an exception.
currently using a NEC billboard with an OPS module and linux mint (not ideal, when the monitor connection sleeps, the audio turns off). This could be good, especially now that there are a dearth of 1.6b small models that could probably run on the SFP's APU (though I could be wrong)
From the install page:
> As of right now, Plasma Bigscreen isn't available for public use yet. This is due to not being developed for so long. The project has been revived, but it might take a while until it becomes stable and is available for public use.
Plasma Mobile didn't get far, but nice to see Plasma Big Screen progressing.
It did not get far in market share, sure, but it never stopped going like Big Screen did and made the transition to 6 at the same time as Plasma Desktop.
Here are some recent developments:
1. https://plasma-mobile.org/2025/07/08/releases-25-07/ (also explaining that most software is part of 'Plasma Gear', which makes sense as it is software for both mobile and desktop, but has the downside of making Mobile less visible)
2. https://blogs.kde.org/2025/07/05/this-week-in-plasma-chuggin... and look for Plasma Keyboard in this post. (Personally I am a bit sad that they are seemingly abandoning Maliit, which is also used in Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch and is IMHO fine, but hey, at least it shows that Mobile is not dead.)
I have an Android TV and its pretty disappointing.
If this can get some of the missing pieces sorted (like input from a remote, and a decent onscreen keyboard that works with it), it could be pretty decent.
I could imagine using some Android TV apps with this via waydroid.