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?

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    7·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • freebee@sh.itjust.worksOP
      4·
      2 months ago

      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

        • Cort@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 months ago

          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.

  • early_riser@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 months ago

    When I hear “HTPC” I kinda assume you don’t want a full fat desktop, at least you don’t want it right at boot, but a TV-specific interface, something that’s easy to use at 60 inches and 10 feet away.

  • CairhienBookworm@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 months ago

    I have a similar Mini PC as an HTPC. I have Debian 13 installed as the base OS. For something like this I want a rock solid stable base with long support. Doesnt get much better than Debian in that regard. KODI, Chromium, Firefox, and Moonlight installed through Flatpak. Works great.

  • Kaigyo@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • freebee@sh.itjust.worksOP
      2·
      2 months ago

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

  • bluemite@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    I have an Intel NUC box and run Lubuntu on it with Kodi auto-starting on boot. It works well.

  • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    2 months ago

    How much did you pay?

    I’m running raspberry pi is on mine but that is just to get pi soexific features.

    I would not recommend libreelec because Firefox is still the most reliable way to watch yt without ads.

    • freebee@sh.itjust.worksOP
      2·
      2 months ago

      179 €. With windows pre-installed that I’ll remove right away because it seemed cheaper than buying RAM and SSD separate currently.

      Still have an old pi laying around, did OSMC+kodi on that for a few years, but now it’s just not powerful enough anymore for handling more recent compressed video