Here’s to all 100 of us Linux couch gamers who all happen to own a Logitech K400 Plus. If you know, you know.
I barely couch game but when I do, I use a controller.
Mostly my Linux htpc is used for streaming but not doing a ton of that anymore. I started buying DVDs again.
But nice to have the option for the two streaming services I do use or YouTube.
Over time my strategy flipped from HTPC being my old desktop builds to becoming the newest build in the house that I do everything fun on. Since my friends still visit for local multiplayer, I have a bunch of 8bitdo controllers and arcade sticks. I primarily use them too yep.
Trackpad keyboard is great for general navigation/web browsing. The joke is there’s very little competition in this form factor. Also have a cushioned wood lap desk with a proper keyboard+mouse. Mouse heavy gaming. Quake Brutalist Jam 3, Nova Roma, HMM: Olden Era, and Toxic Commando I brought out the lap desk for most recently.
This is all Stremio’s fault 😅.
What was your motivation to start buying DVD again? I went all in on digital a decade back after being the guy who owned every major (and some flops) console dating back to the 1970’s for so long. Pirate all in, software emulation all in. I bought a NAS. I hate subscriptions and minimise those. Never sold off vinyl or my movie collection however. Still buy vinyl but no new movie purchases in said decade.
Me and my girl are watching a bunch of different TV shows. Basically showing each other our favorites. While we were watching Dexter, it got removed from whatever platform it was on and moved to another one which meant we had to buy another service just to finish it.
After that, and seeing all of the price hikes, I realized I’d rather do a one time payment for any shows I watch especially because at the current pricing, DVDs are cheaper overall. That and streaming services are trying to add value to themselves by doing original TV. Most of it is garbage that I’ll never watch, so there isnt much value in streaming for me anymore.
That sounds like a really cool setup for gaming. What games di you and your friends play mostly? My htpc is just a little used HP office PC. Far from cutting edge but great for my use case. I used to use a keyboard and mouse for navigation but I didn’t like it. I settled on using an air mouse and keyboard combo. Its not perfect but it gets the job done.
Basically showing each other our favorites.
Very jealous lol.
…DVDs are cheaper overall. …Most of it is garbage that I’ll never watch, so there isnt much value in streaming for me anymore.
When going the legal route, can’t argue with that logic fair enough.
…What games do you and your friends play mostly?
Mixed bag we’re all variety gamers. Much like online gaming for us it’s just an excuse to show up and talk. Lately it’s been Sega Genesis emulation and getting through the harder USA version of Streets of Rage 3. A lot of shoot 'em up arcade titles via MAME. A ROM hack basically a combined version of all N64 Mario Party games into one. We were taking turns playing Death Stranding 2 in the winter. Xenogears before that, again with a hack this time just QoL features and a better English translation.
Or one of these little guys.
Oh my god it’s happening. Everyone stay calm. Stay fucking calm!
Ohhhh it’s finally coming!
Looking forward to trying it.
I’m super pumped to finally have something better than Nvidia Sheild or Kodi
Honestly, I want to like Kodi, but even this first screenshot looks much better than anything I’ve been able to muster together in Kodi.
Same here. Kodi’s UI was nice back in the days when it was XBMC. These days we have different ideas on usability.
Controlling it with a controller is awful, I had to change a lot of settings and it still jumps to a different scene any time someone accidentally bumps the joystick when picking it up or forgets to use the dpad for 10s rewind
Yeah I feel the same way. I feel like Kodi, unfortunately, makes it harder to use my HTPC rather than easier
Yeah this has been on the books for ages. It’s not being developed by KDE’s core team and it wasn’t making much progress for a while but I’m really happy yo see it come out.
yeah i generally dont use kde, but ive been looking for something like this for a long time
Oh I use KDE every day. I love it.
But this would be a very different usecase I wouldn’t use on my main PC.
I’ve been waiting for Plasma Bigscreen for quite a while for my and eventually my family’s living room entertainment system.
Add a DVB receiver and you can just a normal, dumb screen and never have to deal with shitty “smart” TVs again.
Right now? Only buying Android TV because it’s the only OS whixh I can manipulate (using ADB).
FYI this won’t be out until June.
Huh. I wonder if this is maybe related to the Steam Machine? It would be a good use case for it, and the timing makes sense. I know the Deck boots into Steam Big Picture at boot, but you can get to the desktop, and I think it’s KDE. I’ve only used someone else’s Deck for a short time, but I remember it working fine because it has a touch screen. Without that, you need something like this.
I assume Valve would prefer everyone use Steam.
For games, sure. For the rest of the stuff a computer does? Why do they care?
I don’t think so. It’s been around for a while but was unmaintained for a bit so it wasn’t compatible with Plasma 6. That’s why it was removed from the Debian repositories. It’s just been a case of someone who wanted to maintain it coming along. AFAIK it’s mainly aimed at Smart TVs.
Reintroduces, really. Iirc it was originally made for plasma 5 and and was broken by changes in Plasma 6. This is “we fixed the stuff we broke”.
there’s a bunch of improvements too
Yup, it disappeared from Debian repositories in 13/Trixie.
Annoyed at slow release processes since I want this but I also hate the risk of crapping up my system by adding a new source. It’ll be a dog’s age before I can get it on a stable version of Ubuntu, but I’ve had so much trouble installing big corpo programs I need on anything but Ubuntu stable that I’m afraid to leave it.
I run Mint on a HTPC currently, but it might be worth switching to a different distro for this.
How do streaming services like Disney, prime, Netflix, and hbo run on these? Is it possible?
I need something dead simple for my wife.
Probably the same as on a Linux desktop now, the browser sites work fine but you won’t get 4k or HDR.
Worth it in my books. Might be my eyes going bad, but I can’t notice much difference beyond 720p
With respect, if you cannot notice a difference between 720p and 4k on a 4k compatible screen, then you do indeed have something wrong with your eyes.
I sold TVs when 1080p was coming out and there were so many “your eyes can only see the difference between 720p and 1080p if the screen is X big or you’re X close to it” and it was baffling. How could people have such bad eyes? Then I hit 30, 40, and… fuckin HUGE DIFFERENCE STILL. A 16” screen 10m from me? 1080p is going to look FAR better than 720p, much less 4k.
No shade to folks with poor eyesight, but tons of shade to anyone saying there not a difference when they can see it, to justify their purchasing choices (like huge amount of people arguing for 30FPS during the XBone/PS4 gen)
My 60" TV is so far away from the couch that my Steam Deck’s screen in my hands is the same perceived size. Depending on what you’re watching, the difference between 1080P and 4k isn’t that noticeable at that distance. What really makes a difference is HDR. Also note that lower-res content is often way more compressed, which makes it much more noticeable.
You bring up another great point: higher rez with shitty compression or artifacting looks wayyy shittier than lower rez with good compression!
Quick edit: unfortunately for most any steaming service, you get shitty compression AND low rez through a browser D:
I mean… is the situation much better through an app? I haven’t noticed a difference, but I have very little experience comparing the two
It’s not just resolution and colorspace. The providers also drop the
nitrate*bitrate significantly. Which, in my opinion, is way more noticeable and jarring.I was really confused for a moment over why monitors would use nitrate and how it could affect the experience. Then I realized you meant bitrate lol
Man, I’ve really got to get better at proofing my comments before hitting submit, on mobile especially.
It’s for the intros
Either your eyes are bad or the files you’ve watched. There’s an absolutely enormous difference between 720p and proper 4k with a decent bitrate. Also a decent display with good HDR can add a lot as well.
I blame it on my eyes. On the positive, I don’t know what I’m missing.
Resolution isn’t actually important. Dots per inch is, but also it needs to be scaled by distance. Low DPI isn’t noticeable if you’re far away, but even high DPI is when you’re close to it. It might be less that your eyes are going bad and more that you’re sitting further away from your screen or your screen is really small.
I set up Jellyfin and my wife and kids love it. We have no streaming services now.
Unsubscribe to all off them and sail the high seas
I should also add that I live in a third would country so all the streaming services are dirt cheap here.
I think YouTube premium is like $3 a month or something like that.
If I pay for YouTube premium, Netflix, disney, amazon prime, HBO max, spotify. I have to spend around 70 euros a month. (4k content or family pack)
For all that, we are $30-$40 a month.
My wife pays for most of them. I think I only pay the Disney and Spotify.
I just made a server, download 4k content on a pirate site. Spend around 5€ for my mullvad VPN. And we don’t even need to go to the cinema anymore. Which is like 15€ per ticket at least. We do it sometimes for a date to get out of the house. But it just gets expensive very fast once you get candy and drinks.
cries in hard drive prices
I have an old PC with a gtx 1070 with 2tb ssd and 24 GB of hard drives, all bought before the AI price hikes of course. I am already at a net win.
Install Kodi and pirate shows from those services.
Or buy and rip DVDs to put it on your Jellyfin homeserver
Hell yeah!
Are there any distros yet that come with it? I have a pi I’ve been using as an htpc and I’m interested in switching
We are planning to join the Plasma release schedule starting with Plasma 6.7 (in June), which will make it possible for distributions to ship it in their repositories.
I’m imagining it will only be available in rolling release distros for a while.
i wonder if I’ll be possible to flash this on my nvidia shield when it’s out
I was thinking of using it to replace my shields, but reflashing would be even better!
That would be great!
How useful is this in the grand scheme of things if the applications themselves don’t have a 10ft UI? I guess you’d need to limit yourself and find apps specifically made to be shown on a TV… within a repository that caters desktop apps. Blending TV’s and desktops is hard…
I have a Linux HTPC on Mint where I have the Pegasus frontend with Jellyfin, VacuumTube, and a bunch of games. The main usability issue is the need to exit each app differently to get back to Pegasus. There’s no notion of using a home button to go back to the home screen and pause the current process, which is what I’d be hoping to get with Bigscreen. Otherwise, Pegasus is fine for launching apps with a remote, and Jellyfin and VacuumTube work fine with a remote as well.
Jellyfin, VacuumTube, and a bunch of games.
I use Kodi for all of this plus IPTV, etc. It has a customizable “home”, menus, etc. that make it easy to navigate. You can also run audio/video in the background while navigating.
It can be a pain to setup everything but I think it’s worth it.
I use Kodi as my HTPC with a FLIRC remote.
I rarely exit to desktop but, when I do, I often use a wireless keyboard.
It’s somewhat annoying having to switch between the two. I imagine this Bigscreen desktop might help.
How’s HDMI-CEC support in Linux? I remember that being a sticking point last time I considered building an HTPC
Doesn’t work. Not a Linux issue. No graphics card or motherboard maker connects the hardware correctly to support CEC on PCs. It’s an industry-wide practice.
There is the pulse eight injector which together with software can inject CEC with a USB connection with the caveat it can’t turn your computer on and it’s a hacky and imperfect solution for tinkerers rather than production ready equipment. Also it’s only HDMI 2.0 not 2.1.
A pulse 8 would actually be very good with this. You can turn the computer on with a USB remote and the pulse 8 would send a signal to turn in the TV. From that point on, everything else would be controlled with the USB remote talking directly to the computer.
Also the website says CEC will work, so maybe they have a more elegant solution already
How’s HDMI-CEC support in Linux?
Pulled directly from KDE Plasma’s Bigscreen website.
Multiple Input Methods
Navigate with your TV remote via CEC, a game controller, a keyboard and mouse, or even your phone via KDE Connect.
KDE Connect has literally only every once worked for me, via WiFi only.
I don’t understand why they haven’t officially added the Bluetooth support into it by now.
I searched for what HDMI-CEC but it’s not very clear to me. Does it mean that, say, if I have an HTPC, and if I run Kodi, I can control it with a regular TV remote? Should this thing be on a TV too? Would appreciate someone with the supported devices to comment how it works and how you use it.
It means that multiple devices which are connected to the same TV can all control each other.
For example, say you have a streaming device (e.g. Amazon Fire Stick) and an audio receiver both hooked up to the same TV on different HDMI ports. With CEC, you could use the volume buttons on the streaming device’s remote to control the volume on the audio receiver. You could also use the power button on the TV remote to turn all three devices on/off at the same time.
I use LibreElec which is a Linux distro of sorts. It has CEC that works for me
Now how do I control this with a gamepad?
“Multiple Input Methods Navigate with your TV remote via CEC, a game controller, a keyboard and mouse, or even your phone via KDE Connect.”
Should just work out of the box, I think
get a steam controller, old or new, they have touchpad(s)
No.
This is what I really want
This plus a Flirc USB would be amazing. I’m going to give it a go.
Last time I used it, it felt laggy to menu through.
Ok, but why would you run Plasma on a HTPC?Because my TV is a plasma
But fr, because its a htpc designed de. I’ve been looking forward to this because it’ll be a convenient way to control it from the couch.
Steam Machine?
