I am annoyed by the weird UX differences between Kodi and Jellyfin. I really want this to be a thing. I've got an N100 box running libreelec right now. I really want Bigscreen to work on x86. Just need to have patience.
I daily drive NixOS and use it in many other situations. However, I'm also a systems engineer and it's the distro I use for managing all the environments.
I'm sure it was a joke(ish), but definitely not for the light-hearted or fairweather penguins.
Definitely not for the light-hearted, but if OP is willing to take a month or so to learn Nixlang it actually gets quite easy and you can do pretty much everything with it. No need for Timeshift either. You'd have to really work at breaking it and once its set up that's it.
Not to mention if you upgrade your system/SSD you only need a few key nix files and some dotfiles to basically clone your whole setup, especially if you use home-manager
https://libreelec.tv/
If you like Kodi this is the business. I have had it working with remotes, the biggest drawback for me was streaming services not supporting 4k on the Odroid N2+ I was trying to use.
Plex worked great through Kodi, and that was my biggest use case.
Yeah, I'm not sure how well YouTube is going to run on Kodi, I've never actually tried it.
If you have another Linux box around you could install Kodi and try it pretty quickly.
I got openSUSE Leap. It's stable and reliable. My complaint is that I needed to go thru all the hoops to get all the media codecs I need to play what I want.
OP is asking what a good distro is for a media center PC, as in the PC's video output will be connected to the TV's video input. At which point Linux does not give two shits.
Sounds like you thought they wanted to stream/cast via some TV app or something, but that just sounds like a nightmare and I'm not sure that anyone would even want to try to do that. Just run Linux and use the TV as a big monitor, be done with smart TV garbage.
Used cachyos for the last couple months, its a graphical installer, automatic everything, and when it loads you get a startup menu that you can click install gaming packages on to get anything youd download for gaming, its supposdely the only distro actually optimized for gaming and detects your hardware automatically to grab everything.
Off the install and one click installing those packages everything on my steam account (after checking proton compatibility cachyos setting) worked fine for me. Blender also works well, but in that case I needed to grab a driver for amd.
Bazzite made me nervous, I like being able to clixk through the install seeing what im doing. I reinstalled windows right before and did dualboot first, before removing windows and sticking with just cachyos. Cachyos was about 10x easier to install than windows and 1000000x faster, like it straight up took 2 minutes maybe while windows takes 2 hours, I was shocked that it was actually done.
I also really like gparted, originally with the dual boot I had to manually partition the drive for the os and the boot paritition, took a couple minutes to figure our and its very convenient to be able to mess with your ssd easily just by plugging in a usb and booting into the live os from there. Idk if any other installers do that, if anyone knows please let me know, like the usb boots into kde plasma and you can kind of test out the ui while clicking through the gui installer.