A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Controller] - Steam Controller related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
it seems like Waydroid can fill in a lot of the Android gaps that are missing
the only actual potential DRM app I use is Nebula
Not really sure what you're asking. Because of DRM/Widevine pretty much all streaming apps will be unavailable. So what does an "all in one living room box" entail, in your view?
That is literally what it was made to be.
I bet it'll work perfectly. But, of course, there's a bunch of mini PCs out there with a suitable form factor that would be compatible with SteamOS (has to be AMD only, but that's basically the one requirement for SteamOS).
That said, I'd go for the Steam Machine given a choice, so...
I use Jellyfin on the Machine a lot, what's awesome is my TV remote is able to control SteamOS and also the Jellyfin app! HDMI CEC is a must now for me!
I also have the Youtube app with vacuumtube which works flawlessly!
I use my steamdeck in a docking station with extra USB ports.
You can get a FLIRC or equivalent IR receiver to navigate with an old/universal remote or USB keyboard.
I load PLEX-HTPC as a non-steam game.
I also loaded Firefox for Youtube with support for uBlock and other extensions.
How's the navigation of something like YouTube in the browser with a remote? This is another curiosity of mine
Not OP, but I have a dedicated gaming PC connected to a TV for a similar experience (Bazzite for the OS, primarily running Steam Big Picture Mode). Plex HTPC has been pretty smooth to switch between when not gaming. I would recommend using something like VacuumTube (has adblock and sponsorblock settings baked in) to have a more comparable TV experience if you’re looking to watch YouTube too.
Edit: Since you mentioned Jellyfin (haven’t tried using it yet) Switchfin looks to be a Jellyfin HTPC equivalent you could use
As far as I can tell that's the only good excuse I've seen to justify the price point for performance. Don't get me wrong i want one but not because of the performance.
Essentially it has hardware to be able to turn act as a entertainment center and be turned on/off by your TV and auto switch audio devices etc. I don't fully know what the features are because I don't use smart TVs so I might be getting it wrong, but I know home theater nerds will buy it just for those features.
You can try grayjay. Its on flathub, has youtube and nebula setup, and has built in support for controllers.
If you have any PC around the house you can install SteamOS or Bazzite or even LinuxTV onto a USB stick, boot into it and give it a go on your TV. Most streaming services can be "installed" as a browser shortcut on the home screen if there's no app for it.
If you see it working for you and the fam is willing to learn how to use it, buy the steam machine or a small custom pc with better specs for the same money with SteamOS or whatever you like.
One thing I'm interested to know is the idle state of a normal PC vs a normal PC running SteamOS vs the SM on SteamOS. The PS5 pulls something miniscule like 4 watts when it's in rest mode. A regular PC will probably use significantly more. So this is part of the machine's attraction to me; I'm assuming Valve got that well optimized since my Deck is okay at it too. But if any SteamOS machine does that well, hell yeah I'm all in.
I'm planning to eventually do a fresh Linux install on my Machine which launches straight into Plasma Bigscreen.
Already got the multimedia situation sorted out with HDR, 4k and audio passthrough via Jellyfin MPV Shim. Now I just need to check if the Machine still gets firmware updates when launching Steam even when it is not running SteamOS.
Didn't have time to do the setup yet but I'm planning to replace my Odroid N2+ running CoreELEC with this.
For controlling it I wanted to use my Remote 3 and/or the Steam controller.
What makes you want to change to Plasma Bigscreen? I said it in another comment but one big attraction to SteamOS and/or the Machine is the low power idle state, like a regular console or streamer. Curious how other distros handle this.
I don't really want to use Steam as a launcher. It's proprietary and not the most intuitive when it comes to navigation outside of gaming, and most of the usage will be non-Steam stuff.
I also don't want SteamOS on my HTPC, I want something more open that does not send requests to Valve on every boot. That's fine on my Steam Deck but not on my HTPC.
Will definitely test the power consumption and wake up on Steam Controller power on in third party distros.
I assume the low power carries over since they did a lot of work in the kernel.
It's mostly my primary, but I mostly only stream and play steam games with it.
My problem with the machine for thr use of multimedia is that it wasnt really designed in mind for dense storage to host media, ao youre limited to streaming unless you got 8tb ssds layong around
That's okay my server is another machine.