best distro for a streaming box with plasma bigscreen?


okay just to start things of; I AM NOT AN ADVANCED USER, I WOULD SAY BOTTOM OF INTERMMEDIATE AT BEST!!!!

im planning on ditching my chromecast for a little mini pc with plasma bigscreen, so i'm just wondering what distro would be good for that. I'll also be hosting my jellyfin server, and maybe game too but idrk

in reply to goofsqueak

I literally just finished doing this over the weekend. I went with fedora since I find it more stable and easier to use than the other distros plasma bigscreen works on. There have been a few bugs when using a controller but other than that it works great! I highly recommend it.
in reply to goofsqueak

It's not a bad set up at all. There are some additional codecs you will want to get if you have an Nvidia GPU, but there are plenty of guides on that.

Bazzite is an atomic distro with a focus on gaming and based on fedora silverblue. I'm currently running it on my main gaming rig and it's very nice. It is more complete out of the box than fedora but installing something like bigscreen will probably be more difficult. Although, I bet it's possible. I haven't tried to figure it out though.

in reply to goofsqueak

Unless you are just trying to use up hardware you already have laying around, do not do this. The experience is extremely suboptimal and much more expensive than just buying a better streaming box.

If you have not spent money yet there is still time to avoid this mistake.

in reply to TrollAccount69

I'll agree that it's a good device, but this being the Linux community, I suspect most people would prefer something running open source software.

Also apparently these days it's like 250€, 320€ with ethernet and extra storage. No longer feels like a good deal to me, I had one when it was ~170€ with ethernet.

in reply to boonhet

The second gen ones are still incredibly cheap for what you get and will most likely have a long support window (they’re still pushing updates for the old hd models from nine years ago).

As far as being open source, I have done diy linux streaming or time shifting boxes for twenty years before switching to the appletv and the fact that it can connect up to a smb, ntfs or jellyfin is enough for me.

Just trying to save our illustrious op some money, time and heartache.

in reply to goofsqueak

There's a list right on the website: plasma-bigscreen.org/get/

Since Plasma bigscreen is part of KDE, you probably want to start with a KDE desktop environment. So just get Fedora Kinoite (performs "atomic updates" which are a little faster and more reliable) or Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop (traditional packages which maybe have a higher chance to break, a little more annoying to update I think).

To install plasma-bigscreen on Kinoite, you run rpm-ostree install plasma-bigscreen and then reboot the computer.

This entry was edited (yesterday, 9:27 PM)
in reply to goofsqueak

Check LibreElec, if it ticks all your boxes, it's probably the best (simplest) choice.

You can go much more general purpose, but if you don't need general purpose then all that general purpose capability amounts to (intentional or accidental) attack surface you don't need.

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