Developing

Developing the shell

Plasma Bigscreen is developed as a KDE project, and thus uses KDE infrastructure for development and translations.

Our source code is hosted on the KDE Invent GitLab.

See detailed instructions on the developer wiki for building and testing the shell.

To contribute translations, please see the KDE Localization webpage and join the team for your desired language.

Developing new apps

We currently do not provide a first party general-purpose framework for building TV applications.

However, this is Linux! You have the freedom to use frameworks that you are comfortable with to develop TV-focused applications. Some popular options include:

• Qt + Qt Quick
• Electron or Tauri (Web-based apps)
• Flutter

Things to keep in mind when developing apps for TVs:

• Support arrow navigation and Esc to "go back".
• Only capture direct controller input when the window is focused.
• Users may have varied display scalings set, it can be useful to provide in-app scaling options.