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I’d recommend using distro you know best and/or most prefer to work with. I use the flatpak install of Jellyfin Media Player but there are also deb files available.

I’m currently using minipc with Intel n5105 (or something similar) for 1080p HTPC. Debian 12 OS with auto-login & Jellyfin Media Player starting at login. I control it with pepper jobs RF remote but also have a logitech wireless keyboard+touchpad for it. Keyboard+touchpad come in handy when browsing media sites on firefox but some might restrict quality. Some of the newer minipc’s I tried required adding backports repo to install newer kernel for wifi to work. I had been playing with Debian a lot when I set up first one & been using clonezilla to image them so it’s stuck.

Ordered a gmtek n97 minipc to play with and should have it in about a week. Going to test it out with 4k but it’s not a deal breaker for me if it cannot handle that well enough.

Yep, asking for something I’m sure a lot of us would love to have, a ready to go TV remote control style usage, but rather than having discussions about why those options aren’t viable just downvoting.

Create a backup image from the working SD card. Write that backup image to a spare SD card and verify it works. Then try to do ‘apt update’ and see if anything breaks. If it breaks you got a spare SD card ready to go :)

I had issues with DNS checks and traced it to my pihole. I changed that container’s resolv.conf to use cloudflare DNS and it has been working fine since. It was with Caddy so needed to change over to use IPs.

Another thing to remember is the client needs to support decoding the video in hardware or have enough CPU to handle it in software. I have intel i7 (3rd gen) with no hardware HEVC/x265 support but it has enough CPU to power through.

I’ve had good luck with refurbished Dell laptops. My primary laptop is a refurbished Dell Latitude 11" 3120. Bought it for ~$250 at beginning of this year and currently have Fedora on it. It’s not very powerful. I use it primarily to browse the web, watch movies/tv, and vnc/ssh to my other systems. Can last about 5-6 hours streaming video from jellyfin at 50% brightness, other stuff barely uses any power and can stretch out to 9-10 hours if I set display brightness even lower.

I’ve always bought Windows laptops then put linux on them so I’m used to verifying that tools such as TLP are installed, configured, enabled, and working. There is too much variety with laptops for all of them to be handled automatically unfortunately so I always verify it. If a laptop came with Linux pre-installed then it might be good to go ootb but I’d still verify.

Quick way to check if a program is using hardware video acceleration is with a gpu top utility.

Intel - intel_gpu_top

Nvidia - nvidia-smi / nvtop

AMD - radeontop / nvtop / amdgpu_top (just did quick search, don’t have any AMD powered on to verify)

For steamdeck on the couch something like the xreal or rokid would be better. Some people have been able to make VR work with steamdeck with bad performance but they only tried VR games so don’t know how it would be with regular games.

I bought a pair when they were still going by NReal name and they worked well with steam deck and my laptop. Battery life would last longer with only the glasses on. I didn’t like always having to wear contacts so picked up a pair of Rokid’s glasses too. Those have built in diopters and have been working well.

Self-host your own ACME server. Then you can use certbot pointed there.

These instructions are old so not sure if newer/better ways, https://blog.sean-wright.com/self-host-acme-server/

Is MariaDB on spinning disk or ssd?

I initially set up Nextcloud with MariaDB on spinning disk but it was slow even completely empty. I moved that container to ssd & performance was a lot better. The web UI may still have some slow loading parts but I can’t say for sure since rarely use it. Caldav+carddav+Nextcloud client are how I usually interact with it.

Sounds like bridge mode is needed for the vm’s network interface in virt.

I would say proxmox ve is easier to start with.

The container method used should be whatever you are more familiar with or prefer. They both have their own quirks, pros, & cons.

SELinux - If you don’t want to deal with SELinux then set it to permissive mode. If you want to keep in enforcing mode you need to create the appropriate policies, https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/using_selinux/configuring-selinux-for-applications-and-services-with-non-standard-configurations_using-selinux

Firewall - If you don’t want it’s protection then look up instructions to stop & disable it on your distro.

Port forwarding - From linux container side you either need to specify host networking or the ports you want to allow through, there is no avoiding that if it needs to be network accessible. If you want it internet accessible then you need to setup port forwarding on your router.

Have you looked into something like yunohost? It may be the kind of thing you’re looking for.

EndeavourOS on desktop and laptop side of things.

If router supports it, a static route via connected machine with IP forwarding enabled might work. OpenWrt has packages for things like tailscale and zerotier so could do it without an extra machine too.

For 3, if router supports it could also try doing static route via Tailscale joined machine that has IP forwarding enabled

If your router lets you try adding a static route for the tailscale IP/subnet to the laptop with IP forwarding enabled.

For the OS side a few ways.

• Clone & then rename+change drivers
• Ansible/chef
• NixOS

For home folder side of things a dotfile manager, cloud services, and file sync tool will take care of most things. I use chezmoi for dotfiles & nextcloud for file syncing. Firefox is only cloud synced service I still use for now. I have yet to find any decent sources of information on dotfiles so gonna be stuck going through those stupid things to figure out what you want to sync.

My mother used to regularly do photo albums with family photos before we all went digital so I’ve been looking for a solution for years. Nextcloud has been decent with a few apps installed. Only done a couple small albums & worked for my needs. The face detection is alright but cheap cameras, blurry photos, and random mix of internet saved photos doesn’t help, lol. The map view works really well for photos with GPS data. I have my phone setup to automatically upload all new photos to Nextcloud too. Lately been working on plans to share access with my family over zerotier so they can view and upload their own to share back with me.

Yes, my order status has been at preparing to ship for awhile now. I been wanting a good Linux tablet to replace aging iPad and hoping this works well enough for me. I’ll try to remember to update post on how I like it when it does arrive.