Technology

MSI cubi fanless with KDE Neon autologin to Plasma Bigscreen with Vacuumtube, steam big screen mode, jellyfin... Remote controller is a Rii F8 mini which has a few programmable IR buttons for the old dumb TV.

The future is now...

Raspberry Pis have CEC support. I've used it with OSMC (formerly either LibreElec or RaspBMC, one of those? It's Debian Kodi). It was much better without. So, if you turned the TV off with the TV's power button, the Pi would turn the TV back on.

The Pi has a 3.5mm audio jack. I have a set of desktop PC speakers that are hell and gone better than anything built into a television in the last 20 years. Not only is it not straightforward to get it to control the Pi's audio output level with the TV's remote via CEC, OSMC absolutely did not want to do this. Not only would that setting get revered to HDMI audio out, it would disable the analog out option, and you'd have to SSH in and change a config file to re-enable that option in the first place. That would happen either during updates or even just power cycles. I swear the phraseology of the line you'd have to put in that config file would change; the same line I'd put in there would still be in there and not working.

The thing with open source software is, it's always going to have the UX of a sinus infection, especially since the manufacturers of hardware gimp their devices to not work well outside of the walled garden.

I recently tried this with LibreElec on a NUC I already had running pihole. It would randomly freeze, I think due to some integrated Intel video shenanigans.

Next I tried KDE Neon with Plasma BigScreen. For some reason, PlexHTPC ran like absolute garbage on my 4k TV but fine on my 1440p monitor.

I got PlexHTPC running fine on MXLinux but then I couldn't get pihole working with DoH for some reason.

Finally just put Mint on it, got them both running and figured I'd tinker more later. I just needed something that would let me stop using the TCL Roku interface.

CEC does not work, but I got a cheap remote air mouse/keyboard thing that worked out of the box.

I've been using Pi 4s with a lineage OS build that has the Jellyfin Android TV client on it and thats been a pretty sweet setup.

I decided that a game controller and antimicrox were acceptable as a supplement for the remote, and installed a full desktop OS (Gentoo/TDE, like my main system, on a Dell Optiplex box I bought off ebay last year). Works fine for my unconventional needs, although I admit I do updates, etc. over ssh because it's faster than entering one character at a time on the on-screen keyboard.

I just bought a Dell Optiplex 990 for 50 bucks on eBay. I lucked out in that the listing came with 8 GB of RAM. Just threw in a previous SSD, loaded Fedora Kinoite, and am currently playing with Podman/Docker Compose for an Arr stack. By next week, I should be able to move it from the corner where the router is, and then finally deliver on the promise that I made my girlfriend back in February, when I bought the HDMI projector and a speaker set.*

That said, I'm all for your idea, especially if it comes with an IR receiver, too.

If I get another Optiplex (that one for homelabbing), I'll look into COSA and Butane/Ignition files more seriously. That's a very solvable issue, after all.

* We had to move since then and I cannot find the front right speaker, for some reason. The company, whose name looks like the antagonist of FF8, doesn't seem to sell replacement speakers, either.

well, the bigscreen matrix chat does see activity, so, one can hope

Where are the dividends in that? Buy our new stick.