I caved to black Friday promotions and ordered myself a fan less MSI Cubi N ADL S with N100, 4GB ram, 128 GB m.2 SSD and a Rii F8 remote.

To run as “smart TV”, mainly jellyfin, dvb-t2 antenna, YouTube, local public channel streaming from their websites.

Which is the hottest HTPC distro for this right now in your opinion?

It needs to be easy to use for non-techie and super stable and reliable, rather than fancy or brand new and hype.

To replace my current “attach the steamdeck to TV when needed” setup (so I can play on it while something is being watched). And this was experienced as not easy enough for non-techies?

  • justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    2·
    8 days ago

    Btw, is there a htpc tutorial for nix? I haven’t used it yet for anything, so the initial barrier is a bit higher to get it all setup, but I would imagine that you could create the entire system config in a couple files

    • Kaigyo@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 day ago

      Oh, honestly most of the software I’m using on it isn’t configured through nix. I’m sure I could go a bit further configuring Kodi with it, but the other things like Steam and Firefox wouldn’t really benefit.

      If I were you, I’d just focus first on getting the base system setup and software installed. Then once you have the software how you like, start porting configuration over to your nix config file(s). That’s one of the nice things about NixOS; there’s no rush to get everything in a single config file, but you can opt in when it makes sense.

      • justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        1 day ago

        I would just be curious about how to get started, aka having flex automatically started without login prompt. Haven’t used nix yet and somehow the initial hurdle feels kinda high :)

        • Kaigyo@lemmy.world
          1·
          14 hours ago

          For skipping the login prompt, I’m using the setting

          services.displayManager.autoLogin = {
  enable = true;
  user = "your-username";
};

          I would guess that works with most display managers.

          I think I just set flex-launcher to auto start in my KDE settings (not through nix).

          But yeah, the learning curve for nix is pretty steep, but it’s not too bad once you get past the kinda weird syntax. I followed https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/ + the official installation docs for my install. It’ll definitely take some trial and error when writing your config, but the nice thing is you can make all kinds of mistakes without breaking your system.