Had been waiting for my pi 5 argon case which got lost in the post before I could set this up. Ive been tinkering with an old SFF PC running arch over the last few months to get a "smart tv" set up going that im happy with, now ive condensed it down into a little debian box that uses a fraction of the electricity. Happy days.
Yeah it wasnt a straightforward install. I looked at kodi but I didnt like it, havent tried libreelec. I think chromium apps and big screen works well for me
How did you do it? Someone suggested it hasnt been developed a lot recently which didnt give me confidence either.
Libreelec is just an OS to host kodi, thats it. Boots, opens kodi, done. That didnt you like about kodi? The older ui?
I didnt like having to sift through all the different packages to find ones I wanted and that worked with kodi. If that part was easier id have just kept it, the ui is good especially with the skins you can get for it.
Yeah the debian package for bigscreen is a little less box ready than what comes with the new plasma release, hopefully it drips down at some point. But its not such a bad experience that its cumbersome, I just switch over to regular plasma when I need to make system tweaks then change session back to big screen after.
I did a raspi lite install, then installed kde-standard, I tried kde-desktop-session first which is lighter but some configs might be out of date or something because that one didnt work for me it kept hanging up on boot. Then you need to enable the sddm login managers system service and set the os to gui graphical.target, then you can install plasma-bigscreen all from apt.
Oh you can use kde connect too, I havent set it up on this one just yet but on the pc before I was using I used my phone as a remote too.
Awesome walkthrough! Thank you. Sounds like a bit of work indeed.
I suggest at some point you check libreelec from the pi imager. It is awesome in terms of „just works“. Just so you can compare. Maybe you have a second sd card?
Let me know if you want to know anything else.
I will do, I can just unplug the ssd base and use a usb drive in its place for that. Do you know if it will run a web browser? I looked for kodi and apparently theres only a plugin for chrome and not firefox or chromium so youd lose the h264ify plugins that raspi os has
I have not tried running a browser in kodi. I only use the pi as a smart tv and the remote isnt great for typing. I use youtube, twitch and plex so far. It has tons of plugins (apps so to speak) which I dont use so atm I dont bother.
Feel free to update if you find out more.