Looking for a desktop environment for my media pc - eviltoast

I control my media pc running Popos with a remote mouse/keyboard combo I found on Amazon and while this works pretty good, I would like a more “big picture mode” like experience that works well with using a remote.

I know theres some distros out there that are geared specifically for a media pc but I don’t wanna reinstall my system. My internet is painfully slow at times and drops out frequently (yay for rural America) so even doing system updates can take a long time or just time out. I’d rather not babysit my pc to get everything working again how i want it so if I could find just a desktop environment to use that would be great. If not, such is life.

So far, Plasma bigscreen looked the most promising: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/ but any recommendations would be helpful. I’ve tried looking some up myself but searching the web has become pretty useless for something more niche or specific like this and I figure the good people on here would have better advice anyways.

  • Pumpkin Escobar@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Similar to previous reply about MATE with font size changes, I do that with plasma. I hadn’t seen plasma big screen you linked, I’ll definitely try that one out. I’ve wondered about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_Mobile? Like these sort of niche projects don’t always get a lot of attention, if the bigscreen project doesn’t work out, I’d bet the plasma mobile project is fairly active and given the way it scales for displays might work really well on a tv

    Speaking of scaling since you mentioned it. I have noticed scaling in general feels a lot better in Wayland. If you’d only tried it in X11 before, might want to see if Wayland works better for you.

    • Bluefruit@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 month ago

      My desktop pc runs Fedora with Wayland currently and it works really well. I like wayland a lot and was trying to use it on my media pc as well but it wasnt playing well with Firefox for video playback. Not sure if this was fixed yet or if it was even a bug but it was not good when i tried it on kubuntu. Haven’t tried it om popos yet but it might just be an issue with gnome. Ive never been a fan of gnome ever since i started messing around with linux.

      Love kde plasma though, its def the best DE ive found so far. Coming from Windows and all the customization it has, its so nice.