I control my media pc running Popos with a remote mouse/keyboard combo I found on Amazon and while this works pretty good, I would like a more “big picture mode” like experience that works well with using a remote.

I know theres some distros out there that are geared specifically for a media pc but I don’t wanna reinstall my system. My internet is painfully slow at times and drops out frequently (yay for rural America) so even doing system updates can take a long time or just time out. I’d rather not babysit my pc to get everything working again how i want it so if I could find just a desktop environment to use that would be great. If not, such is life.

So far, Plasma bigscreen looked the most promising: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/ but any recommendations would be helpful. I’ve tried looking some up myself but searching the web has become pretty useless for something more niche or specific like this and I figure the good people on here would have better advice anyways.

  • Bluefruit@lemmy.worldOP
    1·
    27 days ago

    Wouldn’t exactly fit my use case because this pc also doubles as my game in bed pc and is what I’m currently using for ai image generation. If i could get big picture mode but still run applications that arent games or for streaming, that’d be ideal. From the recommendations, seems like kodi is a fan favorite but not exactly a DE either. Might work but I’d rather it be a DE than an app i have to run but beggers cant be choosers.

    That said, I have 2 chunky servers that my buddy gave me recently and I’m planning on self hosting a lot of things with them which likely include jellyfin.

    I will say that im slowly getting the internet to a decent spot at least for streaming, generally as long as my connection is fast enough between starlink and my lte connection (using failover with pfsense) i can usually stream ok. Though with one tower in my area and trees surrounding my place, its never gonna be great.

    • dingdongitsabear@lemmy.ml
      1·
      27 days ago

      you can still run both tools, I do so on my main workstation. they stay in the status bar and don’t bother you none. when you’re done working and recline on your sofa, you can send e.g. youtube videos to the rig and they play fullscreen by way of mpv.