XMB BigScreen 1.0.9

For the handhelds: a charge you can read, and a pointer that knows when to sit still.

Changed

• A bigger battery glyph. The Breeze battery is a wide, flat shape that fills barely half the box it is drawn in, so at the previous size the icon came out shorter than the digits beside it — small enough to be awkward on a 7-inch screen. The glyph now runs larger, so icon and percentage carry the same weight. Nothing else in the overlay moves.

Fixed

• A parked pointer no longer drives the homescreen. Resting the cursor near a screen edge scrolls the category bar, which is what you want with a mouse and exactly what you don't want on a handheld: a trackpad leaves the cursor wherever the last swipe ended, so the bar could scroll on its own, and the system overlay could reopen the moment it was closed. The pointer now acts only once it has actually moved, and any button on the controller hands control back to the pad — the cursor disappears while you navigate with the controller, the way a console does, and returns the instant you move the mouse. Mouse behaviour is otherwise unchanged: edge scrolling still runs for as long as you hold the cursor there.

Install / update

git clone https://github.com/FrancescoPnr-dev/xmb-bigscreen.git
cd xmb-bigscreen
sudo ./install.sh

Requires KDE Plasma 6.7+ with plasma-bigscreen installed from your distro's repositories. See the README for details.

XMB BigScreen 1.0.8

Battery and clock, right where you look for them.

Added

• Battery in the system overlay. Handhelds — Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Legion Go — now show their charge beside the clock when you raise the overlay with the PS/Guide button, so you can check it without leaving the game. It appears only where there is an internal battery: a paired wireless controller reports a battery of its own, and that one is deliberately ignored so desktops stay as they were.

• Clock in the system overlay. The homescreen clock sits behind whatever app is in the foreground, so the overlay had no time of day exactly where it is most wanted: raised over a running game. It now carries its own, and the homescreen one steps aside while the overlay is up so the two never overlap. It follows the time and date format you already set in XMB settings.

Both readouts sit in the top-right corner the centred band never reaches, so the band keeps its geometry unchanged.

Install / update

git clone https://github.com/FrancescoPnr-dev/xmb-bigscreen.git
cd xmb-bigscreen
sudo ./install.sh

Requires KDE Plasma 6.7+ with plasma-bigscreen installed from your distro's repositories. See the README for details.

XMB BigScreen 1.0.7

A quality-of-life release: switch to XMB without logging out.

Added

• xmb-bigscreen-swap — hot-swap the shell in-session. Run it from a terminal (or bind it to a shortcut) to replace your running desktop shell with XMB on the fly; run it again to return to the shell you came from, which it remembers by itself. It refuses to run inside the dedicated XMB session, where logging out is the correct exit. Thanks to u/gianpi612 for proposing the feature!

  Note: this is a lite mode. None of the dedicated session's TV setup applies — no separate audio profile (volume changes stick to the desktop), KWin keeps its desktop configuration (screen locking, hot corners, no compositor keyboard) and there is no dedicated gamepad handling. For the full couch experience, pick "XMB BigScreen" at the login manager.

Install / update

git clone https://github.com/FrancescoPnr-dev/xmb-bigscreen.git
cd xmb-bigscreen
sudo ./install.sh

Requires KDE Plasma 6.7+ with plasma-bigscreen installed from your distro's repositories. See the README for details.

XMB BigScreen 1.0.6

The cross-distro release: XMB BigScreen now starts on Fedora and every other distribution that keeps KDE's helpers in /usr/libexec. It replaces the short-lived 1.0.4 and 1.0.5 and contains everything since 1.0.3.

Fixed

• Session never started outside Arch (exit 127 at login). The session's .desktop file hardcoded /usr/lib/plasma-dbus-run-session-if-needed, but that KDE wrapper lives in a distro-specific libexecdir — /usr/libexec on Fedora — so the session crashed before the startup script even ran. The .desktop now launches the script directly, and the script re-execs itself through the wrapper found at runtime. Thanks to u/gianpi612 for the report and the journal that pinned it down!
• No more dependency on a removed Plasma helper. The script pointed at startplasma-waylandsession, which Plasma ≥ 6.7 has removed entirely. It now passes --exit-with-session only where the helper still exists and otherwise launches plain startplasma-wayland, exactly like the stock Plasma session — and it can no longer abort before the session starts, which could freeze the login manager on a black screen.
• Audio state could stay swapped after a crash. The WirePlumber desktop/XMB state swap-back now runs on every exit path — session crash, SIGTERM from the login manager, or a startup failure — and safely recovers from partial swaps. The desktop's audio profile no longer stays stuck on the TV slot after an unclean session end.

Install / update

git clone https://github.com/FrancescoPnr-dev/xmb-bigscreen.git
cd xmb-bigscreen
sudo ./install.sh

Requires KDE Plasma 6.7+ with plasma-bigscreen installed from your distro's repositories. See the README for details.

XMB BigScreen 1.0.3

A visual release: the wave's sparkle field has been rebuilt.

Changed

• Sparkles now ride the wave itself. The particle layer is rendered on the same displaced grid as the veil, so the cloud is locked to the wave's motion — arch, undulation and folds — instead of floating in a fixed screen band that could drift visibly above the veil.
• Wider, deeper cloud. The band opens around the veil's centre-line (spread factor) rather than matching the ribbon's own thickness, and each row carries a parallax cue: far rows drift slower, near rows faster.
• Per-particle depth of field. Dots are smaller overall; focused ones keep a tight bright core with a faint glow while out-of-focus ones spread into a wide dim halo, mixing crisp and faded sparkles like planes at different distances.

Install / update

git clone https://github.com/FrancescoPnr-dev/xmb-bigscreen.git
cd xmb-bigscreen
sudo ./install.sh

Requires KDE Plasma 6.7+ with plasma-bigscreen installed from your distro's repositories. See the README for details.

XMB BigScreen 1.0.2

A housekeeping release: the repository now reflects what this project is — a shell, not a store widget.

Changed

• Removed the leftover plasmoid packaging inherited from the project's origins (tools/make-package.sh and the .plasmoid artifact flow). The one and only way to deploy XMB BigScreen is sudo ./install.sh from a clone of this repository.
• CI now tests the real installation: every push stage-installs the shell via install.sh and verifies the installed tree (homescreen containment, shell profile, session script, Wayland session entry) instead of zipping a package.
• Reworded every stray plasmoid/widget mention in comments, docs and scripts. The Plasma API surface (install paths, QML API, package type, translation domain) is untouched.

No functional changes for installed systems: the shell itself is identical to 1.0.1.

Install / update

git clone https://github.com/FrancescoPnr-dev/xmb-bigscreen.git
cd xmb-bigscreen
sudo ./install.sh

Requires KDE Plasma 6.7+ with plasma-bigscreen installed from your distro's repositories. See the README for details.

XMB BigScreen 1.0.1

A bugfix release focused on living with real apps — above all Steam.

Fixed

• The home overlay can now be driven while Steam (or any app) holds the controller. Bigscreen's input handler mutes every pad key except the Guide button when an application grabs the gamepad, so the overlay opened but could not be navigated. The shell now reclaims the controller whenever you are driving it — overlay open, or no app window in the foreground — and hands it back to the app afterwards.
• Closing Steam's card from the overlay now quits Steam entirely. Steam keeps running in the background after its window closes; the overlay now issues a graceful steam -shutdown alongside the window close, ending every Steam process.
• The shell pauses while an app window is in the foreground. The wave background, glow pulse and clock stop and the ambient loop fades out, so the dashboard no longer burns GPU/CPU or plays audio under fullscreen apps; everything resumes when you come back.

Install / update

git clone https://github.com/FrancescoPnr-dev/xmb-bigscreen.git
cd xmb-bigscreen
sudo ./install.sh

Requires KDE Plasma 6.7+ with plasma-bigscreen installed from your distro's repositories. See the README for details.

XMB BigScreen 1.0.0

The first stable release of XMB BigScreen — a console-like fullscreen launcher for KDE Plasma, inspired by the PlayStation 3 / PSP XrossMediaBar and built for the living room: TV, couch and gamepad.

Highlights

• The classic XMB cross with the animated wave background, monthly colour presets and custom RGB.
• A real Plasma Wayland session on top of Plasma Bigscreen — pick it at the login manager, or enable autologin for a true couch machine.
• Gamepad works out of the box: navigation, system-wide search with a PS3-style on-screen keyboard (Triangle), home overlay with live app previews, volume, brightness and power.
• A settings window in the native Bigscreen TV style, fully driveable by pad.
• Original navigation tick and ambient loop, replaceable with your own sounds.
• Mouse and keyboard fully supported too.

Install

git clone https://github.com/FrancescoPnr-dev/xmb-bigscreen.git
cd xmb-bigscreen
sudo ./install.sh

Requires KDE Plasma 6.7+ with plasma-bigscreen installed from your distro's repositories. See the README for details, autologin setup and controller tips.