Points for something I’ve never tried.
Edit: Think I’ll just blast Bazzite on it. The recent Gnome scales well and it has nice performance tweaks.
Cheers
Almost anything plus mythtv, firefox, transmission and mpv. Done. I use voidlinux. Best ever.
Similar here.
MythTv + Firefox + VLC - all on Arch
Used to be easier when Myth was in the main repos, now I have to compile from AUR, but it’s still ok
None. Move your living room to the forest and never look back. Be free.
But there’s no memes out there!?
The memes are the friends we made along the way :)
Okay this looks kinda neat, but the page says it “isn’t available for public use yet”? More of a DE/tweak than a distro?
@Reygle it looks like you can build it and or use an rpi 4 build
*secretly i just want more info on it myself :D*
I am annoyed by the weird UX differences between Kodi and Jellyfin. I really want this to be a thing. I’ve got an N100 box running libreelec right now. I really want Bigscreen to work on x86. Just need to have patience.
This looks nice!
I tried using bazzite as a media PC and gave up after a couple of days, this isn’t even remotely something I want in my household.
try it on fast hardware and make up your own mind. good luck!
p.s.: plasma bigscreen isn’t available for public use and kodi and its derivatives should be tossed in the deepest volcanoes we got.
I would have thought open/libreElec would have worked.
other mentionables centered around media are AVLinux , Ubuntu studio, and dynebolic.
Batocera is nice too. It’s half an emulation console and half Kodi. You can tell it to launch Kodi as default too. Whereas LibreElec is only Kodi with a limited gaming ability
dynebolic
Ooh neat there’s one I’ve never heard of
it’s not well known and has had some down time but has been around for more than 20 years.
Cool!
Used cachyos for the last couple months, its a graphical installer, automatic everything, and when it loads you get a startup menu that you can click install gaming packages on to get anything youd download for gaming, its supposdely the only distro actually optimized for gaming and detects your hardware automatically to grab everything.
Off the install and one click installing those packages everything on my steam account (after checking proton compatibility cachyos setting) worked fine for me. Blender also works well, but in that case I needed to grab a driver for amd.
Bazzite made me nervous, I like being able to clixk through the install seeing what im doing. I reinstalled windows right before and did dualboot first, before removing windows and sticking with just cachyos. Cachyos was about 10x easier to install than windows and 1000000x faster, like it straight up took 2 minutes maybe while windows takes 2 hours, I was shocked that it was actually done.
I also really like gparted, originally with the dual boot I had to manually partition the drive for the os and the boot paritition, took a couple minutes to figure our and its very convenient to be able to mess with your ssd easily just by plugging in a usb and booting into the live os from there. Idk if any other installers do that, if anyone knows please let me know, like the usb boots into kde plasma and you can kind of test out the ui while clicking through the gui installer.
https://libreelec.tv/ If you like Kodi this is the business. I have had it working with remotes, the biggest drawback for me was streaming services not supporting 4k on the Odroid N2+ I was trying to use. Plex worked great through Kodi, and that was my biggest use case.
I’m a Plex guy so that part is appealing but I admit I mostly watch youtube in this scenario
Yeah, I’m not sure how well YouTube is going to run on Kodi, I’ve never actually tried it. If you have another Linux box around you could install Kodi and try it pretty quickly.
At the moment youtube isn’t working on kodi :(
At least for me
I daily drive NixOS and use it in many other situations. However, I’m also a systems engineer and it’s the distro I use for managing all the environments.
I’m sure it was a joke(ish), but definitely not for the light-hearted or fairweather penguins.
Definitely not for the light-hearted, but if OP is willing to take a month or so to learn Nixlang it actually gets quite easy and you can do pretty much everything with it. No need for Timeshift either. You’d have to really work at breaking it and once its set up that’s it.
Not to mention if you upgrade your system/SSD you only need a few key nix files and some dotfiles to basically clone your whole setup, especially if you use home-manager
Please tell me more about your work and how you use Nix in it. I’m interested.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or facetious 😅
I assure you it isn’t all that glorious, though, just a lot of configs. NixOS is just my favorite method of infrastructure-as-code, and in conjunction with
nixopsI can’t imagine going back to anything else unless the project required it for some reason. Disaster recovery is simple, and testing/pushing config changes to hundreds of machines is almost too easy.I have a clunky set of configs, for self-hosting at home and small side-clients, I slapped together you can look at, but again it’s not all that special and I wouldn’t necessarily follow this for real production stuffs. It also doesn’t utilize any of the fancy NixOS stuff, fairly basic and Docker heavy.
I am serious. I am a cloud engineer (glorified system admin for cloud + Linux VMs) and I’m still stuck on Ansible + Terraform (stuck isn’t the right word, we are a RHEL and Alpine shop for our VMs and Containers and things work well enough). My friends in bigger companies are using Nix though, but I was always scared of the learning curve. I want to see clear benefits of using nix so I can push myself to actually learn it, which is why I asked. Thanks for the link.
Oh, sweet!
In that case, I highly recommend taking a look at some more real-world examples. That link is just something that makes self-hosting and small jobs more or less thoughtless for me.
Imagine all those config management tools built into your OS, and that’s NixOS in a nutshell. There’s obviously WAY more it can do if you look into creating your own derivations, or getting into the new-ish concept of Flakes.
Again, though,
nixopsis the thing that makes me continue to use it, besides just already knowing how to throw together a config in nix’s syntax. The nixops tool basically allows you to federate all your systems, tag them, group them, and do anything under the sun with each machine (or several in batches). It’s hard to get across in a simple text blurb.In my case (SaaS), imagine having 10 devs that all want their own dev environment that mirrors production within our VPN, then you need a beta and production environment for each client that licenses the app. Each environment has a couple databases, a few different APIs, some background scraper-type applications, and front-ends for everything. Some of that stuff can live on one machine, some needs to be alone and redundant. You can see how very quickly there’s a lot of machines to keep track of.
Now I need to update a couple config pieces to match a new feature in the app itself. Well, all I gotta do is sort out the config, then run a couple nixops command to push to all the dev environments. When ready, do the same for beta, then do it for prod when the fat lady sings.
Being all within one ecosystem, focused on security hardening, is what I really like about it. Hopefully that wasn’t too stream-of-consciousness for ya, lmao.
ETA: links, also note that nixops is undergoing some serious changes in the past year. NixOS itself also undergoes changes fairly regularly in syntax as vulnerabilities are addressed and improvements made.
Thank you for the note. I’m been cursing myself for not being able to provide my devs with something similar (they don’t complain but I know it will make their lives easier). I will start nix from scratch if I learn it but nixops definitely seems like it can help because terraform isn’t that great at the example you provided. Thanks.
focused on security hardening
Could you elaborate?
Some NixOS native packages and options change the defaults to be more security conscious rather than “easy to spin up.” Doing a basic nginx config in NixOS will be more secure than if you had installed it through debian’s apt or from source. Similar for ssh, you just don’t have to think as much about doing those few obvious config changes you always have to do when spinning up a new machine. Of course, there are some things you have to customize for yourself (like custom ports, paths, etc.), but they make it a little simpler by assuming you’re using NixOS in a production environment.
A couple of other links that you’ll end up referencing all the time if you get into NixOS:
The first link is the native package repo, and the second link are all the NixOS config parameters for each of those packages and the system in general.
they don’t complain but I know it will make their lives easier
Perfect. So when you do provide them with an efficiency boost when they never asked about it, you can be a rockstar and get a raise. Or keep it in your back pocket until they do complain and implement it then for a similar effect 😜
Nix looks like a fun way to wild away 3 weeks, not entirely sure this is what I’m after for a living room TV box. :D
I got openSUSE Leap. It’s stable and reliable. My complaint is that I needed to go thru all the hoops to get all the media codecs I need to play what I want.
Glad you like it, not sure it’s a fit for my lazy living room machine though.
Honestly, I picked it because I was lazy. It’s such a low maintainance machine. As for the codec, the flatpak version of VLC does it.
NUC? Check http://minisforum.com/.
That appears to be hardware, not a distro
Oh, sorry, my bad.
LOVE Minisforum- but I’m looking for an interesting distro, not interesting hardware to run it on. :)
My bad, apologies.
No worries, their machines rule, I have a bd790i motherboard!
Puppy Linux
Linux pretty much just doesn’t work on TV. No streaming platforms have Linux support, unfortunately.
Bazzite, Chimera, Nobara all have a pretty sweet SteamOS-like distro, if you’re after gaming and have AMD GPU.
I think you misunderstood, hence the downvotes.
OP is asking what a good distro is for a media center PC, as in the PC’s video output will be connected to the TV’s video input. At which point Linux does not give two shits.
Sounds like you thought they wanted to stream/cast via some TV app or something, but that just sounds like a nightmare and I’m not sure that anyone would even want to try to do that. Just run Linux and use the TV as a big monitor, be done with smart TV garbage.
I didn’t misunderstand anything. The downvotes are just from salty Linux users who think piracy tools are a direct replacement for streaming services.
A media center is nothing without streaming apps.
piracy tools 😂
Piracy tools are a direct replacement for streaming services. Thats kind of the point of them. In fact they are better.
Linux doesn’t work on TV
proceeds to name 3 distros that not only work but do gaming
My brother in Christ…
I mean could have just read the next sentence and that would have cleared up your confusion…
The next sentence that incorrectly implies AMD is at all a necessity for those distros?
- That’s not what I said.
- That would not be the next sentence. Try again.
It was the next sentence after the list of distros referenced in the response to you, and it is still very misleading at best.
But, yeah, the second sentence. There’s a huge difference between an HTPC and an Amazon stick, Roku, or “smart” TV.
Those have apps and must be supported by “platforms” because they are limited hardware with a limited OS.
YouTube and Netflix don’t need to “support” Linux any more than they need to support Windows for an HTPC.
If that’s not what you’re saying, you’ll probably want to elaborate because I expect there are plenty of readers giving your comment a “wha…?”
“E” - since Buddy is trying to imply I changed my comment after he responded, no. I added clarity within a couple minutes, changing no ideas. Talk about gaslighting with this guy.
It was the next sentence
You’re just lying. And I don’t know why because everyone can see it. You’re not fooling anyone and you’re not accomplishing anything.
There’s a huge difference between an HTPC and an Amazon stick, Roku, or “smart” TV.
Yes there is, in that a PC is much more versatile. But streaming services are a basic function of HTPC.
YouTube and Netflix don’t need to “support” Linux any more than they need to support Windows for an HTPC.
Yes…they do? And they do support Windows.
E: the comment above was edited and they continued to double down and argue instead of just admitting that they made a mistake.
I’m… lying?
No, it’s pretty clear now that you’re quite confused about the difference between apps and services.
And they do support Windows.
Oh god, tell me you’re not using the windows store apps for these services on a PC. Even my Alpha kids know better than that.
Seriously, how can someone be even a little familiar with Linux and be so wrong about internet services working on Linux?
And your attitude is just… something else.
Yes but we all know no one talks about Linux and is referring to Android.
