KDE Plasma Bigscreen For Smart TVs Adds Support For KDE Connect

You may already know that the KDE community develops a very well-known Plasma desktop environment for Linux-based OS and Plasma Mobile for smartphones.

Surprisingly, in March 2020, the community announced a new project called “Plasma Bigscreen” to provide a desktop for big TV Screens. It also released the first beta images of Plasma Bigscreen for the Raspberry Pi 4.

Now, after the eighth month of development, the Bigscreen project has made a new and second beta update available to download for Raspberry Pi 4 with several new features and changes.

Before we discuss the new update, let me brief you about Plasma Bigscreen. It is a free and open source user interface powered by KDE Plasma and Mycroft AI’s voice assistant technology for Smart Televisions.

The most important enhancement that Beta 2 has added is the support for KDE Connect KCM and Indicator. This means you can now pair your KDE Connect devices with Plasma Bigscreen.

Not just pair, but if you enable the Bigscreen plugin on KDE Connect, you can also navigate the bigscreen interface using your mobile phone.

Among the core components, bigscreen image has upgraded its base to KDE Neon Focal 20.04 and now features kernel and firmware from the Raspberry Pi Kernel version 5.4.y branch.

Furthermore, for a more seamless voice application experience, the latest beta image of Plasma Bigscreen has included newer default installed skills and voice apps like PeerTube and upgraded Mycroft-Core to their 20.08 branch release.

At last, with current release, an armhf image is also available to download supporting armhf base system.

How To Get Plasma BigScreen Beta 2?

Currently, Bigscreen images are only available for Raspberry Pi 4 devices. Hence, if you own a Pi 4 single-board computer, you’re all set to enjoy Plasma Bigscreen.

The only thing you need to is to grab the Plasma Bigscreen Beta 2 ISO from here, flash it to a microSD card using image writing tools like Etcher, insert your microSD into the Raspberry Pi 4, and boot the desktop.

Once the device starts, you’ll have to go through the device registration, and then you’ll be ready to experience BigScreen. If you find any difficulty, you can follow the official step-by-step guide here.

The post KDE Plasma Bigscreen For Smart TVs Adds Support For KDE Connect appeared first on Fossbytes.

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