I’ve found Android TV to be the most usable TV OS tbh. I use Konstakang’s LineageOS Android TV 15 image on a Pi 5 which is source available (non commercial only licence). And Projectivy Launcher (closed source but is by an indie dev and better than the stock Google one). The Pi is CEC compatible so I can control it with my TV remote no problem, and I use Moonlight to stream games from my PC.

If you already have hardware, there may be an Android x86 TV release somewhere but I haven’t personally tested any, and you have to make sure the apps you want support x86 (all the open source ones like Jellyfin should)

Edit to add: I also personally haven’t found a need to install GApps as all the apps I use are either open source, or were made to work also on FireTV so don’t rely on GApps APIs. (Use SmartTube instead of YouTube, it’s a better experience anyway)

Is that a really young Brodie Robertson on the right??

I built a near identical server for my parents and just sync my nextcloud folder to theirs using syncthing

I remember trying the Android TV 14 image a while ago and it was basically unusable as you describe, the new Android TV 15 image has fixed virtually all those issues for me. YMMV but IMO it’s worth experimenting and seeing if it works for you, there’s a chance I just got lucky though

I’m currently using a raspberry pi 5 flashed with Konstakang’s Android TV image, it works pretty flawlessly and takes less than an hour to set up, assuming you have the APKs of everything you want to install. You don’t need to mess around with Google play services because most TV android apps are also designed to run on firesticks which don’t have it.

The one issue I have encountered is that the Jellyfin client very occasionally won’t play some 4k HDR media in the default player (all my 1080p stuff works fine) so I also installed MPV and I turn on alternative player in the Jellyfin settings in the rare case something doesn’t work.

I use sunshine and moonlight using a pi 5 running Android TV as the client. It works perfectly for the occasional video stream but latency for games is a bit rough. You’ll probably be fine playing something relaxed like Stardew Valley but platformers (I’ve tried Ultimate Chicken Horse) and racing games (Mario Kart Wii running in Dolphin) are just bad enough to be unplayable. This is with both devices connected over Ethernet (albeit through a powerline adapter and my router is fairly cheap) so WiFi will probably be worse.

Not sure if sunshine and moonlight just have loads of overhead or if there’s a part of my setup causing the latency.

I use Glutun for this

… My vacuum actually does run Linux.

!It’s a roborock with Valetudo installed so it doesn’t need internet access!<

The original switch also had an option with grey joy cons

I would argue that keeping your own digital library on a home server is “better” (more convenient) than a bunch of discs that will also degrade over time.

Same situation here! I was a vertical tab hater for quite a while but I’m really liking Zen’s UI so far

“Critical thinking skills only count if they’re MY critical thinking skills” do they not see the irony?