I caved to black Friday promotions and ordered myself a fan less MSI Cubi N ADL S with N100, 4GB ram, 128 GB m.2 SSD and a Rii F8 remote.
To run as “smart TV”, mainly jellyfin, dvb-t2 antenna, YouTube, local public channel streaming from their websites.
Which is the hottest HTPC distro for this right now in your opinion?
It needs to be easy to use for non-techie and super stable and reliable, rather than fancy or brand new and hype.
To replace my current “attach the steamdeck to TV when needed” setup (so I can play on it while something is being watched). And this was experienced as not easy enough for non-techies?
You might be able to install Android x86 on this, and use it however you would use a typical Android box. Another option is libreelec.
If I were you, I would install Nobara or Bazzite, the HTPC version. Which can boot directly into Steam Big Picture. You can install Jellyfin client, add the TV version to steam and you can launch it with steam big picture mode, and Jellyfin’s Linux version of TV mode supports gamepad navigation. For Android apps you can install Waydroid and use whatever android app you need, like SmartTube. It might be a bit time consuming to set up, but it will be way more versatile, as you can easily just boot to desktop mode and do other things as well. Plus, you can play games. Emulated games would run great on this device, you can use something like emudeck or retroarch.
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I don’t know about hottest, but on my little HTPC I’m running NixOS with KDE (mainly for KDE Connect, but it’s nice to have a DE of some sort when things crash/break).
I set up flex launcher to auto start and added menu options for Kodi, Firefox, and Steam.
I used to run LibreElec. It was mostly fine, but the Kodi YouTube plugin breaks just often enough that I wanted to have a web browser as backup. Also, I eventually wanted to play/stream games to it.
Btw, is there a htpc tutorial for nix? I haven’t used it yet for anything, so the initial barrier is a bit higher to get it all setup, but I would imagine that you could create the entire system config in a couple files
Oh, honestly most of the software I’m using on it isn’t configured through nix. I’m sure I could go a bit further configuring Kodi with it, but the other things like Steam and Firefox wouldn’t really benefit.
If I were you, I’d just focus first on getting the base system setup and software installed. Then once you have the software how you like, start porting configuration over to your nix config file(s). That’s one of the nice things about NixOS; there’s no rush to get everything in a single config file, but you can opt in when it makes sense.
Flex luncher is also the best I found so far. Only used it with openbox, so I was lacking the kdeconnect part, which sounds nice. I tried plasma-bigscreen, but that really didn’t agree with me. I’m wondering why there is so little choice in this segment, as it feels like htpcs are a thing much longer than self hosting
Yeah, I’m surprised too by how little there is for htpc use cases. And I’m bummed by how little development plasma bigscreen has seen.
My parents and I use Bazzite. I know it’s mainly used for gaming, but since you can add non Steam programs just fine, it works great for a media PC. You can configure Jellyfin to style itself for TV and work with keyboard/controller. There’s also a YouTube TV app (I forget what it’s called, but it’s on Flathub).
I use the windows gyro remote from Pepper Jobs, and it works great. The PC sees it as a keyboard.
Yeah seems super gaming oriented that’s why I doubted, but apparently there’s a Bazzite HTPC version, will probably start with trying that and see how well it fits the situation
Oooh shoot, bazzite HTPC version? Tell me more.
Edit: wait, are you referring to deck mode?
I think they are. However you can add other (non-game) applications into steam’s launcher if you want access to more utility than a media center focused os would provide.
Then again a dedicated os like Kodi can use hdmi-cec to allow you to control the PC with the same remote for the TV.