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?
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.