RadioGlobe: radio from all over the world on a globe, in Plasma

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RadioGlobe: radio from all over the world on a globe, in Plasma

Hi everyone,

While poking around Omarchy, I came across Radio Atlas, a little plugin that shows live radio stations on a globe you can spin. Click a dot and there you go, you are listening to a station on the other side of the world. I found it really cool.

So I thought: why not have the same thing in Plasma? I turned it into a Plasma 6 plasmoid, RadioGlobe.

RadioGlobe

In short:

  • a globe with one dot per station, fed by the Radio Browser community directory
  • click a country to see its stations, search by name or genre, and the globe shows you where it all happens
  • playback goes through mpv, with the media keys and Plasma’s media player
  • an icon in the panel, and you can drive the radio right from its tooltip
  • a sleep timer, to fall asleep listening to the radio
  • and it speaks French as well as English

To install it, it is on the KDE Store. All you need is mpv and mpv-mpris, and if something is missing, the widget tells you what to install.

The code is here: https://github.com/rcspam/radioglobe

All feedback is welcome, bugs included. And if anyone wants to translate it into another language, it all happens in po/.

Happy listening!

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i would like to state for the record that i will not be installing this, not even out of curiosity, because of it’s linkage to omarchy alone.

but when you say “I turned it into a Plasma 6 plasmoid” do you mean you did or had AI do it for you?

this does not look normal, or human.

Screenshot_20260924_095124
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@skyfishgoo Fair point, and bad timing on my side with everything going on this week.

So I’d like to clarify my view on AI, as an old Linux user (since 1998, yes, I’m an old man :wink:).

For anything structural (the kernel, critical services, security, the base of the desktop environment…), I don’t trust AI-written code that no human has reviewed. There, every line has to be read by people who know the code. So of course, unreviewed AI code has no place in this kind of development. We need to be able to trust our systems.

But what are we talking about here? Small, ordinary personal tools shared with the Linux community. When I need a tool that works, or want something cool on my desktop, I build it quickly, that’s all. I wanted a radio globe on my desktop, so I made it and shared it (a few days for this one). Other personal tools take longer, sometimes months, even with AI help. Not so long ago, you had to get your hands dirty for a lot of the things you wanted on your desktop. And most of all, for various reasons, we don’t always have the time to write them by hand. So yes, in those cases AI is very useful. Maybe we need a small badge saying a project contains AI-written code.

Now about RadioGlobe. Like a lot of Linux users, I tried Omarchy. I found this plugin pretty cool, so why not have something similar on my desktop? It’s a personal widget, it’s not a KDE project. Only two files come from Radio Atlas, under the MIT license and credited in the LICENSE. The rest is plain Plasma and mpv.

Finally, I don’t believe my little work on a few plasmoids threatens the work of the KDE developers. So I’d have preferred you wait for my answer and my point of view here before posting my profile. It’s a bad example for the cause you’re defending: a few personal widgets are not what that debate is about. Especially since I mostly agree with you.

Cheers

KDE and AI, and you, and me
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you are right, of course, that 3rd party widgets and themes etc are fair game for AI contributions, as there are ample warnings in plasma that you are venturing outside the KDE product and completely at your own risk.

the issue i take is with human claims of ownership for AI generated code.

disclosure has to be a part of any solutions going forward.