The basic thing going on here is simply that the KDE guys are working on a 10' experience and that's great, there is no good 10' experience today on Linux. Unless you count Steam Big Picture mode I guess? But a desktop environment which knows what to do about 10' would be really exciting.

Edit: for anyone who's interested, this appears to be the repo for the Bigscreen project: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/activity

The distro images on the website may be out of date.

It is perfectly reasonable to criticise the marketing when it gets in the way of the message. Having to find and read the FAQ to discover that it is basically just a prototype desktop environment for existing distros is a bit silly.

Once I found out what it was, it was still quite cool and I am curious to follow development, but I agree the site design/layout/copy is confusing at best, misleading at worst.

Totally reasonable to feel this way, but personally I think naming is so important that it transcends any technical merit a project might have.

For my own projects, I never write a single line of code until I come up with a name I truly love. Some times it takes weeks, but then the project has an identity which keeps me motivated over the long term and actually inspires my technical choices of what to build.

Compare to the “Yet Another” naming scheme which (to me) feels like a preemptive apology for a project’s mere existence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yet_another

Or it's a strong signal toward the creators that their clever idea for naming was only clever in their heads and nowhere else?

I too got confused and was wondering "is this a project to revive old plasma TVs somehow?".

This is, somehow, typical in most Linux software I've used. They just don't care. :/

What about Xbmc/Kodi? Works great on a raspberry pi hooked up to my TV... Has been doing that since the early 2000's when it ran on my brothers Xbox (original) but that was pre-Linux.

Edit: spelling

Maybe the post's main link should be changed to this one? That Bigscreen website seems to be confusing and out of date.

There are 10' experiences for Linux (Kodi, Plex, and Steam Big Picture are what I know of), but these aren't integrated into the desktop, they are focused on TV/movies and gaming respectively, so KDE focusing on this problem is something new.

Although I think your point is correct.

Can the vendor OS be wiped from these devices?

If so, is there a list?

What they have in the Downloads section now is basically a variety of distro images which you can run on a Pi, or a device that supports pmOS, etc. There's a long way to go before you could buy any random smart TV and flash this onto it. Though maybe less long if you have a smart TV with an embedded Pi which might be a thing these days?

On topic: I'd love to have my TV run an open source OS that can run all the streaming apps to avoid OEMs snooping on what I'm watching

But ironically, DRM is only a huge annoyance for paying law abiding customers.

Did you pay Ubisoft $50 10 years ago for Assassin's Creed 2, am amazing game? Great, because now you can go f*ck yourself instead of playing the game since Ubisoft took the server running the DRM for that game offline. Did you pirate the game? Great, because now you can play it for free indefinitely.

And there are countless horror stories of paying customer bases getting shafted on the products they (used to) own via DRM.

To prevent piracy, or something.

Meanwhile pirates enjoy Blu-Ray rips encoded by people known for taking pride in providing the highest possible quality.

https://copyright.gov/1201/2015/fedreg-publicinspectionFR.pd...

Yes, it still sucks when publishers make their customers jump through hoops like this, potentially exposing them to malware if the necessary DRM circumvention software comes from a dubious source.

The idea of not letting a device connect to the Internet is slowly becoming a thing of the past unless you live in a faraday cage (which is becoming more and more tempting). Oh, correction, thanks to mesh networks like that of Alexa living in a Faraday cage is not actually enough if at least one device is connected. Yay.

The more difficult option is if they come with cellular modems built-in, thus bypassing any of your infrastructure (which needs authorisation). That of course is technically possible, tho probably commercially unacceptable (modems cost ~15 to 20 dollars in bulk which is significant at smart-tv scales, not counting the data cost).

Nope, the whole point of Amazon Sidewalk is that it "just works." I don't think there's even a way to know what devices are connected, let alone any kind of authorization.

Many people have positive associations with KDE, but associate Plasma with bloaty QML based desktop widgets from the KDE4 era. If they even associate it with KDE, and not with plasma TVs or blood plasma.

Nevertheless, as for what I personally feel, I agree - I like KDE better.

But oh, the picture quality back then, compared to LCDs and rear projection. No comparison, and even today, it holds up well.

Won't die... Been wanting to upgrade to a newer larger tv for years, but this thing keeps running along without issue...

it isn't about that it's more economical purchase when it dies, but I even saw people breaking stuff just so they "had to" buy new thing that they want.

I’m not saying this to be snarky or judgemental - your comment genuinely made me think about the issue and this was my response.

If you watch a lot of movies, it isn't an issue. Plus, the TVs came with a 'burn in' reduction program that you could run a couple times a year, but that operated by sweeping an intense white bar across the screen, so you were effectively 'wearing' the pixels down to a similar level to reduce the obvious burn in. If you ran that cycle to often, it would kill the maximum brightness.

While plasma uses a bit more energy than LCD it's not that big of a deal (especially if you've got one of the last gen plasma panels) if you don't use it as some sort of moving wallpaper but just turn it off when not in use.

Still, wouldn't recommend buying a huge TV. Jevons paradox and all.

BTW, it had been dead for 10+ years...time flies so fast.

It's not really confusing or hard to search for if you know that "Plasma" is a KDE product - for instance, Plasma Bigscreen is the first Google result for "kde plasma tv" and "kde tv". It's 8 years old, it covers several different products with a similar look and feel, and it sounds as cool as it looks.

Big brands don't have an issue with using common words for product lines (like "surface" and "pixel"), and I don't see why open source should cede that ground.