I had a living-room media server for many years. My recommendation: Don't put a media server in your living room.

Instead, get a tiny, quiet, privacy-respecting client (e.g. Apple TV) and put the media on a NAS that lives elsewhere. Depending on your preferred client UX, you may (Plex) or may not (Infuse) need a separate app to serve the media.

Whether the server lives in your living room or office/homelab doesn't really matter in terms of its effect on the popularity of "self-hosting". If anything, local media library management is likely to become less popular, and any "Trojan horse" effect has happened by now since people have been doing this for a couple of decades.

So yeah, I'm very keen for something plug and play in this space.

I have a repo that uses a Harbormaster (a Comppse-based deployment tool I wrote, https://harbormaster.readthedocs.io/) to set everything up and keep it up to date, so all you need to do is run the Harbormaster container, point it to the above repo config, and the apps will run. Then, you just need to configure each app, but the directories will be set up properly.

It's a bit of work, but probably not as intimidating as it sounds.

https://github.com/skorokithakis/mediacenter-in-a-box/

You can use Plex as a DLNA server together with a DLNA client (like players built into most TVs), so Direct Play and Direct Streaming should work just the same.

gnome-randr-rust: https://github.com/maxwellainatchi/gnome-randr-rust :

> `xrandr` for Gnome/wayland, on distros that don't support `wlr-randr`

Kernel-fsync: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/sentry/kernel-fsync/

gnome-vrr: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/kylegospo/gnome-vrr/ :

  gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['variable-refresh-rate']"

system76-scheduler: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/kylegospo/system76-s...

I've been blown away by Bazzite. I haven't yet (so far at least) run into any downsides of being on Bazzite instead of SteamOS, yet have had numerous upsides. I've wanted my Decks to be on my tailnet for a long time, but that was not an easy proposition. There's numerous packages that don't flatpak well that I've wanted to install into my base OS but haven't been able to until now! An example, I use Remote Play to run the games on my beastly desktop while viewing them on my TV. Something I routinely do is SSH into the host machine and run htop in one tmux pane and nvtop (for my AMD card, yes it works great with AMD now!) in another pane. To me this feels like the difference between driving with a speedometer and tachometer vs. driving without. Such a simple thing, so hard to do with Steam OS, yet so easy with Bazzite.

I might have to do a comparison of NixOS and bazzite since bazzite has me curious.

I'd be curious to know what you find.

Also:

> - Comes with patches from SteamOS BTRFS for full BTRFS support for the SD card by default.

Interesting, what advantages does BTRFS bring in gaming/steamdeck scenarios ?

edit: juste read on https://gitlab.com/popsulfr/steamos-btrfs:

> Btrfs with its transparent compression and deduplication capabilities can achieve impressive storage gains but also improve loading times because of less data being read. It also supports instant snapshotting which is very useful to roll back to a previous state.

I guess it's for easier rollbacks on the system and maybe rollback different versions of the same game ?

Flash Media HATES overwriting data in place because it requires the block to be freed, then re-written.

Now, modern flash firmware tries its best to allocate new blocks anyway, so some of it is a wash, but it is overall a better way to write to flash media.

I run a homegrown gaming htpc with an R5-5600, Radeon 6800XT, and then the Xbox wireless dongle and 4 Xbone controllers with Bazzite.

You'd be surprised at how much of heavy lifting is done by the kernel and mesa stacks, that's where the real work is done. Fedora does a good job pulling in kernel and mesa updates relatively quickly and the steam client handles the proton updates.

There's also great synergy between Bazzite, ChimeraOS, and Nobara, which are all gaming focused distros. Lots of code sharing and teamwork happening there, which is awesome to see. Everything is open for people to hack on.

It acts like a big steamdeck, all the performance overlays work, all the xbox controllers work ootb, fsr works, etc. - you do need to pair the controllers with each controller but that's a one time thing. I've personally completed God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Baldur's Gate 3 and other AAA campaigns in 4k. And then when I need to travel all my game progress is on my deck. It's a full multi device experience.

But to set expectations: VR and multiplayer games that don't opt into EAC or use kernel-level anti cheat are a no-op, as well as anything Epic makes. To me it's just like any console platform, you get lots of games, and some games you can't play. At this stage in the game both Windows and Linux suffer from the same UX shit show, horrible third party launchers are the worst problem with either set up.

Disclaimer: I'm involved in universal blue but don't directly contribute to bazzite.

However I did it a while ago and went down the HoloISO route. Would you recommend that I switch out for something like Bazzite, or are the benefits good but not *that* good that I'd have to spend a day reinstalling all my games?

Deduplication can be useful if you store the Proton/Wine runtimes on the same disk. Different games may need different runtimes, the latest version isn't always the best, and a Wine environment without any games inside of it can take up a couple hundred megabytes just for DLLs and other common dependencies. Deduplicating can save a chunk of wasted storage, although with current flash storage prices that's probably not worth worrying about in practice.

Some people like the checksumming but IMO that's not all that useful without ECC memory.

Main benefits are compression, and increased read speeds from compressed drives, especially from the MicroSD.

BTRFS de-duplication also solves the issue of wine prefixes with similar dependencies taking up more space than needed.

I have a Legion Go. I don't have the specs handy now, but the SSD was rated fast enough that I suspected compression would harm my overall performance.

All Linux filesystems will by default allow "TEST" and "test" and "Test" to exist in the same folder, which no Windows application is ever intended to handle. Wine works around this by default.

Windows apps are expected to handle case sensitivity gracefully in non-FAT filesystems.

Every single one of these should be present, along with our own tweaks and changes made upstream at Fedora.

It's a shame other FS's don't have it.

Title: Linus Torvalds: Nvidia, F** You! Duration: 0:39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ

Proton has received patches for Nvidia support in particular, some from Nvidia themselves.

Maybe something Nvidia related?

Originally I wanted something akin to SteamOS that allowed packages to be installed and maintained through updates, and knew Fedora could offer that after using Silverblue for about a year, and it just kept evolving and growing from there.

We just launched HDR in testing, and are working on custom kernel signing so we can move that to stable without breaking secure boot support.

If you want to support us for the time being, all I can ask is that you give it a try and report any bugs you may find to us. The more users the better!

Universal blue has a ton of different people contributing to it, but there's no corporate backing there either.

I may compare them in detail in the future, any thoughts on how they compare?

It's that last part that made me switch to it from NixOS. I was tired of random things not working because of Nix's opinions on how things should work. I run Bluefin Linux with Fleek and get all the benefits I liked about Nix with none of the nonsense.

But a home folder encryption rather than full disk might solve the touch input problem.

Was considering just doing some RPi based dongles on bedroom TVs and a higher spec gaming PC with Steam Big Picture on the main TV, but with all the innovation recently I feel a bit of choice paralysis.

Anyone willing to share what their setup looks like, or what they're planning to do in the coming year?

My recommendation: Get a tiny, quiet, privacy-respecting client (e.g. Apple TV) and put the media on a NAS that lives elsewhere. Depending on your preferred client UX, you may (Plex) or may not (Infuse) need a separate app to serve the media.

https://youtu.be/te1AEj_RA64

I'm not quite following - this is a host OS that runs things in containers, or the OS inside a container?

https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/container/ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/OstreeNativeContainer...

The OS itself is run on the bare metal.

I would like to know this too.

Installation is pretty quick too! Here’s a video I made showing the process https://youtu.be/doQW1FyAISQ

You could run any of the replacement Steam Deck OSes (Jovian/NixOS, Bazzite, Chimera...) and get a UI that's identical to what's on the Steam Deck, down to the "Deck Verified" badges and sidebar sliders that may not work on your machine. They're all essentially running the Steam Deck UI atop whatever distribution each one chose.

I'm not sure you'd want the literal Steam Deck image on your machine. It's an older kernel with a bunch of patches that expect the SD's hardware. But if you want to explore that more, there was an excellent article on the front page this morning about building your own clone of Steam OS.

Here is Containerfile from the repo: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile

What is the advantage of Steam OS or Bazzite over Ubuntu variant + Steam?

Steam, gamescope, and nearly every other listed feature are native packages.

  $ flatpak list --columns=size,name | grep MB| grep -Po '\d+\.\d+'| paste -sd+ | bc
  7025.2

  $ flatpak list --columns=size,name | wc -l
  54

  $ df -h /
  Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/sda3       232G   15G  214G   7% /

KDE image Flatpaks: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/system_files/d...

vs.

GNOME image Flatpaks: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/system_files/d...

If you're looking to save a few gigabytes, then I suggest using the KDE variants.