this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
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Privacy
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A docked Steam Deck works for this. It even has HDMI-CEC
Most definitely, it's essentially a full Linux PC. You could do a lot of things with it.
So 720p streaming and a lot of maintenance.
I so very much want to ditch closed source but then i'm limited to piracy really, and any setup really requires hours of maintenance here and there at minimum.
Video frontends like GrayJay and Revanced let you pick streaming resolution and it actually gets followed. Plus they work for multiple services like Youtube, Patreon, Nebula.
If you're not happy about getting 720p from Netflix in a browser, that's from Netflix being cunts. You're better off voting with your wallet and dropping them.
Also, maintenance? It's minimal. You get an update popup in the video frontend maybe once per week and wait 30 seconds after hitting "yes". And you can add an extension on Deckyloader to autoupdate all of your software in the background each day without needing to do anything
Hours? Running Fedora and enabling DRM on Firefox ain't that complex, neither is installing the waydroid flatpak. I think you're really blowing the situation out of proportion. Assuming you already have the iso probably like 30 minutes to get set up including a full install.
Not who you were responding to, but it took me weeks and several iterations to get an acceptable working HTPC for the family. Sure what you described can get you up and running in Netflix in a browser rather quickly, but try handing that solution over to a 6 year old and see how that goes. That experience is nowhere near what you get with say a Google tv, where everything just works right out of the box.
Linux can't do streaming on the major apps over 720p, there are no apps designed for the TV, you have to use the browser. The Jellyfin desktop app is pretty bad on Linux, and so is Plex.
The solution I finally landed on was Kodi with the Jellyfin add on and a flirc remote. That works well. But it's not something you are going to get working in 30 minutes, and you have to go full pirate. It is a terrible experience compared to Google tv otherwise.
Yeah one of the distros I listed above which I haven't used personally is literally just enough Linux to run kodi. I mean installing Kodi also only takes seconds. Now to be clear we're talking about billion and trillion dollar companies vs a group of people mostly volunteering their time for free. On one side you get no privacy or flexibility but amazing customer service and UI. On the other it's isn't as polished but far more free, private, and flexible.
When making deals with the devil things are usually nice at first until he comes to collect later. That's the whole gimmick. Get people by the nuts by making it so easy for them to walk into your grasp.
Ya, LibreElec is what you are referring to probably. That was actually the first thing I tried and wow was it unstable. Averaged maybe 5 or 6 crahes per day. And their forums were near useless, the devs there were closing nearly every ticket due to piracy.
Once I got onto a standard distro things improved dramatically. First I tried the Plex desktop app. No hardware decoding, so the thing couldn't really play 4k at all. Then I tried Jellyfin. That couldn't play anything period, and the remote didn't work.
Kodi worked immediately, minus audio passthrough. Took hours to figure that out.
Once you get it all working it's awesome and it's what I use to this day. But I would only ever suggest it to someone if they are willing to go 100% pirate and willing to troubleshoot. It was literal weeks to get all the quirks worked out.
Any tips for Libre+kodi? I just installed it on my pi and man it friggin sucks (and I'm a linux user used to things sucking). Can't get any streams to work correctly. I guess it would be great to play videos from my PC, but that was already working with plex...
Basically, just pirate everything and play it on kobi?
The RPi might be part of your issue. I started out with one, and it was so slow I couldn't stand it. I'm running a beelink n100, uses a little more power (idles at maybe 12 watts).
And ya, the streams are very unreliable. If you want to go full libre, you'll want to source your own content with sonar/radarr, and if you are using Linux desktop, Plex really isn't a great option, they hardly support it. You'll want to switch to Jellyfin and use their plugin for Kodi, it works really well. Plex has a plugin for Kodi but it's unofficial and is very unreliable last I tried.
Also keep in mind that at the moment you will lose HDR unles a you use something like LibreELEC.
In short, right now my implementation is PopOs, Kodi Flatpak with Jellyfin Add-on all sourced using Usenet (Sonarr/Radarr) on a beelink n100 with a flirc remote. With this setup I get the least amount of complaints from the wife and kids. When I want to watch sports I pull up Firefox and stream from there.
If you do use Kodi I can also recommend the Artic Fuse 2/3 skin. It gives you a look very close to Plex, in fact I think it looks better.
Rule of thumb in open source and honestly even in closed source, the more users there are, the more funding there is, the better the result is. Linux has a ton of like highly niche projects being run by like one guy on his free time with zero funding.
Even in a worse case I still think the effort is worth it for someone who wants to pull away from the iron clasp of the data overlords where they can. In this life it is rare we get something without giving something in exchange.
That said now that you know you also gained valuable knowledge and skills you can apply to anything else you want to do. That is it wasn't like you wasted time completely.