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?
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
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
Flex launcher looks cool, thanks. Might be more convenient and slicker than trying to put everything in steam and autostart steam…