What is xmb-dashboard?

XMB Dashboard is a fullscreen app launcher widget for the KDE Plasma 6 desktop, styled after the XrossMediaBar menu from the PlayStation 3 and PSP. It is a fan tribute and is not affiliated with Sony. Instead of a normal desktop menu, it opens as a fullscreen overlay with a wave shaped animated background, letting you move sideways between categories and up and down through apps, closing again with the Escape key. It supports keyboard, game controller, mouse wheel, and mouse edge navigation, plus type to search that pulls results from KDE's own search tool. There are original ambient sounds and a navigation click sound, both optional and replaceable with your own audio files. The settings panel lets you adjust icon sizes, the position of the cross shaped menu, how scrolling feels, the look of the wave background, sound choices, and which app categories appear. The README recommends pairing it with a specific free icon theme from the KDE Store for the cleanest visual match. Installing it requires a KDE Plasma 6 desktop, version 6.7 or newer for full controller support, and the Qt6 Multimedia module for sound, which most Plasma installations already include. Installation itself uses KDE's own widget packaging tool from the command line, after which the widget can be added like any other Plasma panel item. This project is aimed at Linux desktop users running KDE Plasma who want a nostalgic PlayStation style interface for launching apps, and it is licensed under GPL-3.0. The README also credits its sources: the animated wave background is a QML port of an earlier fan project, which itself was inspired by a web based prototype, and the sounds are original recordings rather than audio taken from any Sony product. A tools folder in the repository is used only during development for generating sounds and translations and is not part of the widget that actually runs on a user's machine.