I have always wondered why Plasma Mobile and Plasma Bigscreen have existed as separate shells, because with a bit of configuring and the right widgets, you should be able to turn vanilla Plasma into something that can run on a TV. I think a better idea would be to release “configuration presets” that the user can “install” to change their Plasma instance into something like Bigscreen or Mobile.
I think the reason is that you don’t need the whole plasma (desktop) shell on mobile, or on a TV. It would be less work to create a whole new shell than retrofitting the existing desktop paradigm onto mobile/TV. There’s already a ton of shared components between all three, so it’s not a huge burden.
Not really, Bigscreen depends on having the entire shell being accessible by the remote. While I think you could probably force the shell to work kinda via it’s existing keyboard shortcuts, I dunno about that 