So for the past little while I’ve had a Pi 4 hooked up to my TV as a Kodi box running OSMC, which has been okay I guess. Having recently built a new PC, my old Ryzen 3600/GTX-1080 box is freed up, so I’m thinking of replacing that Pi with something that can also run Steam.
I’m completely at a loss for what system to run for a living room couch/TV experience. Kodi…could be better, OSMC doesn’t have a desktop and won’t launch just a normal web browser, it uses Kodi as its only UI and it’s just not fully good enough.
I’m also not sure if Steam Big Picture Mode is capable of being a media center. Like, can it play movies from there? My experience with Steam’s Big Picture Mode is it runs like microwaved shit anyway, feels as responsive as the average dogwood.
I want to be able to get to my collection of movies on my NAS, play Steam games, and do some web browser tasks like watch Youtube and that kind of thing. I just don’t do the streaming services, I don’t need Huflix or NetMax or whatever.
I used to run Steam BPM under steamcompmgr, and had Kodi as a shortcut via “add a non steam game”. You could do a browser similiar way. steamcomomgr is a X window manager that handles scaling for those small dialogs for TV screen. Gamescope is similiar for Wayland.
Now I have Debian stable running plasma-bigpicture, which is a KDE set up for TV screen. Flatpak gives the latest Kodi and other apps that the OS doesn’t keep up to latest version, and I do enjoy the stability of the underlaying OS for HTPC use.
Which is better? It depends. If you do mostly games and Kodi, and use a game controller for controll, then Steam BPM. It has a controller friendly OSD keyboard for text, and the upscaling of starting dialogs especially for older games if a nice feature. For youtube, this may not be the best option, and it needs a bit more work to set this up for the Display manager as a xsession.
Plasma-bigpicture is nice if you want to run apps made for traditional desktop, and have a keyboard and mouse. Say for youtube you may want to use some unofficial players to get rid of ads. You can set Steam to auto-start on the background to get game controller input working on the desktop. Setting this up is as easy as installing one package, and switching the session via login manager.
Ofcourse, you can have both and switch from you login screen. You can’t have Steam running on the login screen for that game controller friendly keyboard for login, but you can set automatic login for the one you use most, and switch by logging out.
As for distro, pick the one you like most and know your way around.
I hope this helps, have fun.