So for the past little while I’ve had a Pi 4 hooked up to my TV as a Kodi box running OSMC, which has been okay I guess. Having recently built a new PC, my old Ryzen 3600/GTX-1080 box is freed up, so I’m thinking of replacing that Pi with something that can also run Steam.
I’m completely at a loss for what system to run for a living room couch/TV experience. Kodi…could be better, OSMC doesn’t have a desktop and won’t launch just a normal web browser, it uses Kodi as its only UI and it’s just not fully good enough.
I’m also not sure if Steam Big Picture Mode is capable of being a media center. Like, can it play movies from there? My experience with Steam’s Big Picture Mode is it runs like microwaved shit anyway, feels as responsive as the average dogwood.
I want to be able to get to my collection of movies on my NAS, play Steam games, and do some web browser tasks like watch Youtube and that kind of thing. I just don’t do the streaming services, I don’t need Huflix or NetMax or whatever.
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You could run just any Linux distro and use Steam for gaming and Jellyfin for media.
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I think you may have misunderstood.
I currently have a Pi running OSMC (basically Armbian - Kodi) which I am going to replace with my old desktop gaming PC, a Ryzen 3600/GTX-1080 rig, which can run Steam and any game I want to play on the couch with a controller locally under its own power.
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What is lineage os Android TV? Couldn’t find it anywhere on my search engine.
Also I don’t know what people mean by “the wall that is nvidia on linux” I have been using my gtx 1660 on Linux and it just works. Since I use bazzite you can select your gpu model before downloading the iso file and it preinstalls nvidia proprietary drivers. I’m not sure what it’s like on other distros but it seems fine.
In fact I also have an rx 6700xt but unfortunately I could not get a display output on Linux no matter what I tried. So for me nvidia has been better than amd on Linux.
Try opensuse. That’s working great for my living room PC.
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I’ve been using Kodi on rpi4 and 5 for years (just using Rasbian), not a gamer, but it seems there is a steam launcher for it if that helps: https://www.addictivetips.com/media-streaming/kodi/steam-games-on-kodi/
I’ve tried out Steam Link on my Pi 4 in OSMC. It’s bad. Couldn’t pipe sound from my desktop PC to the Pi, so I’d have to either use my bluetooth headset on my desktop…being unaware of that software’s existence improves the lives of millions of Americans every day.
I didn’t like big picture mode from the TV much, especially for media. I stuck with just using a lighter DE (Mate in my case) with some tweaks to make it easier to read from the couch and use a wireless smaller keyboard and trackball.
I have debian stable with xfce on a 2014 laptop. Increasing the fonts size and using KDE connect for remote on the phone to control the whole thing. Works smoothly for video and internet, just what I need.
It’s tedious when you need to run terminal commands so I have an SSH server running there too.
For gaming maybe you want to consider moonlight utility, to stream steam games from your gaming PC to your TV PC. It’s decent for most games but forget competitive shooters.
