The biggest thing they need to do is find a vendor that will sell devices with this on it, then figure out which Distro to set it up with.
I would love an Arch or Debian based distro powering my TV streaming apparatus. In the meantime, I'll continue to use Apple TV since I'm in that ecosystem already, bit I'm always open for a true Linux TV experience if someone makes a small form factor Linux for TV device that lets me SSH into it if I really want to, but contains all the eye candy of a TV OS.
The problem is, any streaming device that's not fully locked down and blessed by the holy gods themselves (i.e. iPhone, un-rooted Android, Fire TV, Chromecast 4K, Apple TV) will not be able to get more than 720p/1080p quality. The streaming providers are really really nasty about that, no matter that enough ways exist to dump any and all shows in full quality anyway.
At this point, I think pirating is more moral than actually paying for your digital media. The digital media scene for shows/movies is so incredibly hostile to consumers that not giving them money feels like the moral position. I don't feel it's necessarily the case for music (Qobuz) and especially games (GOG, hell even Steam). Not sure on books since I mostly read blogs, scientific articles (that definitely _should_ be pirated) and freely available math/crypto texts.
Owning and running a local media server at home doesn’t automatically make one a pirate, there is free content and some laws allow for ripping and streaming your copy to your tv or other device.
There is not a lot of free content out there comparatively. As for ripping yourself, that's fine, but usually it's:
1. Takes a lot more time.
2. Costs _a lot_ more money than streaming services.
3. Is _often_ illegal.
You could say price shouldn't be an issue here, if we're talking about morals, but a single season on BLU-RAY of shows can easily cost ~70 USD (at least here in Denmark), compared to a ~10 USD streaming service. The idea is, of course that the largest fans and collectors are willing to purchase these, but it's not doable for replacing a streaming flow. So practically, it's a large consideration.
And principally I really can't blame pirates when they get their stuff, cheaper, better, faster and more easily. Again, Steam represents a nice counter-balance, Steam is much easier, while still being very affordable, than pirating. I haven't pirated a game in 10 years, even for studios who I would rather not have my money (Disco Elysium), I still purchased the game on sale, just for the convenience.
> I would love an Arch or Debian based distro powering my TV streaming apparatus.
I'd prefer one of the immutable variants for that kind of appliance device. My personal bias is toward OpenSUSE MicroOS, but Debian or Arch based would also be good. (That doesn't mean you can't ssh in, just that there are more guardrails and the system can better self-maintain by default.)
Immutable is a new part of the distro world for me I kind of want to like it but last time I tried to setup one of those Atomic distros it didnt really work for me, I appreciate them for what they are but it made me realize what I personally wanted was Arch, bleeding edge so I always have up to date software.
Atomic distros would do it for me I think. Something very stable.
Course atomic distros make me think of Debian more than anything ;)
Atomic and update speed are orthogonal. And ex. https://blendos.co/ and https://arkanelinux.org/ are atomic Arch derivatives if that's your speed. (Not explicitly endorsing either, but they're there.)
Being an https://getaurora.dev (Universal Blue based) user I don't notice updates at all. I don't update, updates happen in the background. What difference does "speed" make then?
If someone finds a security vulnerability in software you're using, it would be really nice if you could get the update in the very next reboot instead of needing to wait a few weeks for it to come through
I have an AMD APU Linux PC hooked to my TV with a Logitech K400. Its a bit more fiddly than a throw away android based TV stick thing but you have complete freedom and control.
I watch everything on my web browser with a fancy OLED monitor. The problem is that many services won't give you even HD, let alone UHD. I'm stuck at 480p for renting movies on YouTube.
Android TV sticks scare me, but the Apple TV seems... okay.
Ryzen 5 4600G on an ITX board with 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe and hard-wired gigabit. It's hooked to a ~40 inch Sony 1080p dumb TV via HDMI.
I don't use fancy GUI media centers or anything, just a standard Debian XFCE desktop scaled up. Netflix and Hulu work just fine in Chrome and Firefox. No idea about 2k+ performance due to 1080p limit. TV for me is mostly background noise so media quality is of no concern to me.
My only gripe is once in a rare while the audio goes to shit and continually crackles but reboot and its fixed.
Would be nice if valve released a steamOS box, steam big picture for gaming/game-streaming and Plasma big screen for other media. Like you know can use the plasma desktop on steam deck.
They did something kind of close to this in the past, but as a streaming device that connected to a desktop [1]. A roommate of mine had one hooked up to his projector we used as a TV in the living room. If I'm remembering correctly, there was both a dedicated first-party controller and the ability to use console controllers (Xbox, PS4, etc.).
What's interesting to me in retrospect is how this might have been an intentional stepping stone on the way to the Steam Deck; they got to dip their toes in hardware at a time when the company didn't have much experience in it, as well as a lot more testing data for their controller support that would become an important part of how users interact with the Steam Deck. When I first got a Steam Deck, I realized how many years they probably had been planning something like this given all of the long-term bets like this that it capitalized on (heavy investment into Linux gaming being another big one). It took me until their more recent official support for other handheld gaming devices on SteamOS to consider that if they planned that far ahead for the Steam Deck, there's no reason that wouldn't have to be their ultimate end-goal, and they could have similarly long-term plans still in motion that the Steam Deck itself could just be a stepping stone to. My current theory is that they might not even care about being in hardware in the long run as much as making SteamOS the de facto default for the emerging market of "handheld desktop" gaming consoles (or whatever the term is for devices like the Steam Deck). I could easily imagine that getting the Steam Deck out first as an established player being a strategy to try to prevent what presumably would otherwise be a Microsoft-dominated future for the market in the same way that they've been basically the only player in traditional desktop gaming systems for so long, and using Microsoft's own playbook to do it by just providing the OS and not the hardware. Interestingly, the Steam Deck is remarkably open to being used pretty much however I want (i.e. giving me a full-fledged desktop mode where I can install whatever I want and letting me set up games I didn't get from Steam to run in the more streamlined gaming mode in the exact same way I already do it on my Linux desktops), so my perception is that in the long run they're expecting for the investments to pay off in terms of the revenue from game purchases made by users of these devices, since buying from Steam is still the most streamlined option even though playing games from anywhere else is still supported. Considering the fringe benefits all this has had in terms of making Linux desktop gaming a pretty viable alternative nowadays and that their support for using the hardware however I want is better than what the vendors of the existing major players in mobile devices offer today, it's hard for me to be unhappy with the idea of a future where this plan succeeds.
I am halfway convinced the idea of a "10 foot ui" driven by a remote is... well not wrong, but perhaps we could do better. Have the big screen be for just that, a spot to display video. Have the remote control, with the entire UI, be on a phone. I would keep the interface as a web interface so you don't have to screw around with an app to make it work, and include collaborative features so everyone gets to fight^wshare over what is shown.
I bet apple would actually be a great case study here. They have a great 10 foot UI, the world's shittiest TV remote, and a very easy to use system where your phone can be the entire UI and the TV can just play video (AirPlay).
If people still use the 10 foot UI despite the bad remote, I think the 10 foot UI must be the right idea. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure apple will never share those usage stats with us.
This is basically what a Chromecast was. Internally they were basically just an appliance that booted to a very minimal version of Chrome which could be remote controlled by a compatible application, web site, or device.
It was a neat concept but I always found it annoying to have to keep going back to the app to control it when I was doing something else, or keep a tab open in my web browser, and it would often disconnect the session so no one could control it without just stopping and restarting entirely.
You can still use that interaction model on the newer Chromecast-branded devices but they're also full-fat Android TV devices that can be used standalone with a dedicated remote control and run actual apps, which I think is a nice balance.
>The biggest thing they need to do is find a vendor that will sell devices with this on it, then figure out which Distro to set it up with.
If you can not figure out how to boot a raspberry pi or another micro computer with this, you should not be using it. There is a base technical competency required to run any Linux distro and being able to flash an image to an SD card and boot from it is part of that basic tech literacy.
I would love an Arch or Debian based distro powering my TV streaming apparatus. In the meantime, I'll continue to use Apple TV since I'm in that ecosystem already, bit I'm always open for a true Linux TV experience if someone makes a small form factor Linux for TV device that lets me SSH into it if I really want to, but contains all the eye candy of a TV OS.