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.
Currently using GNOME with PaperWM and its pretty nice.
I’m just running a pain Linux with the MATE desktop, with increased sizes of mouse cursor and UI elements.
The big thing is using VLC with a wireless keyboard, and using a white sharpie on the keycaps to show the quite customised VLC shortcuts.
It’s been years since I tried Kodi et al, and I always found the actual media playback to be lacking some customisation (eg. audio or subtitle timing offsets).
In lieu of a media database, I simply mark the movie folders with file emblems when I’ve watched a movie or episode (VLC keeps track of partial viewings, resuming where it left off).
I mostly use this pc as a streaming box for online content like youtube or crunchyroll so not really sure kodi would fit that anyways. Will probably have jellyfin up again at some point so might use kodi for that? Idk, mot something im doing anytime soon.
Rn im using the default for PopOS and like you, scaled the ui. Its fine, but not quite right yknow? Ui scaling in Linux hasnt ever felt quite right to me especially when I’m using a tv.
I also use this pc to do other things so its not just a media PC all the time which is another reason why i was looking for a desktop environment rather than a whole new os.
Is mate pretty good for scaling well? I havent used it before but a small gripe is that the default for pop doesnt scale well when the taskbar always shows. Applications get cut off at the bottom. Pretty annoying.
Similar to previous reply about MATE with font size changes, I do that with plasma. I hadn’t seen plasma big screen you linked, I’ll definitely try that one out. I’ve wondered about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_Mobile? Like these sort of niche projects don’t always get a lot of attention, if the bigscreen project doesn’t work out, I’d bet the plasma mobile project is fairly active and given the way it scales for displays might work really well on a tv
Speaking of scaling since you mentioned it. I have noticed scaling in general feels a lot better in Wayland. If you’d only tried it in X11 before, might want to see if Wayland works better for you.
My desktop pc runs Fedora with Wayland currently and it works really well. I like wayland a lot and was trying to use it on my media pc as well but it wasnt playing well with Firefox for video playback. Not sure if this was fixed yet or if it was even a bug but it was not good when i tried it on kubuntu. Haven’t tried it om popos yet but it might just be an issue with gnome. Ive never been a fan of gnome ever since i started messing around with linux.
Love kde plasma though, its def the best DE ive found so far. Coming from Windows and all the customization it has, its so nice.
I’ve gone the other way - there is no interacting per se with the media PC; instead, it’s a dumb sink that plays back everything you send it, by way of macast and jellyfin-mpv-shim. you use android apps to send it stuff (e.g. newpipe share to allshare which connects to macast and jellyfin android app which connects to JMS) and to control playback (pause, skip, change subs, etc.). so, all media selection and playback control is done from the mobile device, no need to touch the media PC doing the playback.
not sure this will fit into your use case because of spotty internet, but that should prompt you to install jellyfin post-haste. then you have two options, the mentioned android app + JMS or just the jellyfin media player which can run in TV mode with a pared down controller (up/down/left/right/enter/back) - I’ve successfully repurposed an ancient Apple Remote that has just those six keys.
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.
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.
Oh interesting. I may look into that. Thank you for the suggestion!
