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)

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

I explicitly wanted a google one, not some Samsung-shit who add their own garbage on top of Google’s garbage.

Samsung TVs run Tizen which is their own OS, rather than a skinned Android TV. It’s pretty minimal so you need some other box or stick if you want a good watching experience, but it doesn’t do anything hostile as long as you turn the tracking bs off at setup, and there are no ads in the UI (at least on the 2019 model my parents have).

There’s no truly open source TV OS though :( I miss Firefox OS

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.

Zen is based on Firefox, it supports 100% of firefox addons, as well as supporting its own community mods system for changing the browser itself

Zen is literally the best browser around right now, I do understand the UI isn’t for everybody but if you vibe with it, it rocks

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

learning online is way more effective and efficient.

Take it from someone who was at university during the pandemic, noooo it is not

From what other people have said and from the occasional video that’s popped up on Youtube, Discord has a library of CSAM content that its automated systems match against and there are certain individuals that try to bait people to post seemingly innocent pictures that are actually frames from said videos. Discord’s systems see that the image is a frame from such material and will auto-ban the account

Framework 16 does have a dedicated GPU option, and it’s upgradable.

I recently set up Fedora Kinoite on my dad’s laptop for him and he seems very happy with it. Kinoite is the atomic/immutable version with KDE Plasma by default. Once I’d set up a couple of things everything else he needs can be installed with flatpak (just make sure to set Flathub as the default and disable the Fedora flatpaks repo that ships broken packages all the time)

You joke, but this is a real problem in computing Obligatory link to Tom Scott video.

Matrix isn’t fediverse though. It is Federated but uses its own protocol

The average person has a 1tb+ drive and doesn’t care about a few hundred megabytes of bloat in a partition they will never look at. If someone is switching from Windows, every app having its dependencies self contained is mostly normal anyway (aside from the occasional system provided dll). The only people likely to care about removing old flatpak platforms are the kind of people who don’t mind running the command to remove them.

If you’re walking towards someone on the street and you want to avoid the whole “I’m going left you’re going right” dance - DO NOT make eye contact with them and glance toward the way you intend to go. They will automatically go the other way and you won’t bump into anyone ever again

Why not use Waydroid?

Of course portal and portal 2 are fantastic games but I would never recommend them to someone who has never played a game before. One of the reasons it’s so good is because it subverts the tropes and even mechanics of other games.

I was that nerdy kid that would tell anyone at every possible opportunity that thier iPhone was locked down garbage and they should switch to Android. Now I find any kind of vocal brand loyalty incredibly cringe as it just reminds me how I used to be when I was 14.