alt Hacker NewsAt the risk of whatever, I feel like there might be a "market" for something like the "OpenBox" version of this - or perhaps what I'm saying is even using something like Openbox to get the minimalist version of this thing.
Seems to me a 10-foot interface almost by definition doesn't need the complexity of a KDE; you need to launch apps from "big rectangles on the screen" instead of like a Start Menu(and probably configure those to be 10 foot friendly) -- and MAYBE a few widgets and that's it.
I've always wondered why that doesn't seem to exist, and now probably with vibe coding may just work on it myself.
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Build it on Retroarch and you don’t even need X/Wayland. And the menu/launching functionality is done, you’d just be making a theme for it.
Really if someone made a WebKit “core” and a Jellyfin client “core” (which, actually, you might get “for free” with the browser if you can tolerate web bloat on your platform) under libretro it’d be a pretty damn capable set-top-box UI. All the “cores” right now are games/emulators, but they don’t have to be.
and after you launch the app, then what? are you rewriting chrome or firefox?
regular kde is usable enough on my tv from the couch, just bump font size and 200% scaling. done.
these ideas are reminiscent of a time people thought kiosk modes were a good idea.
what one call complexity most people can being able to do anything at all.
Joe's Window manager might be a better choice than Openbox (imo) if someone does want to work on it.
Maybe FLTK/FLWM can be interesting as well.
I'm totally with you on this and a great idea. Always used flux/openbox whenever I could on my own workstations, and the idea that it could be used for a big screen device would be great.