Plasma Bigscreen is a New Smart TV Experience Powered by Raspberry Pi 4 and KDE
DannyB writes:
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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