Hey all! I'm planning on redoing my setup on my PC hooked up to my TV. What I have now works, but I want something a little more streamlined. I mainly use it for watching videos on Piped (YouTube frontend) and tv/movies in Jellyfin, but I recently set up Sunshine/Moonlight for game streaming, and my current setup doesn't allow me to use my existing controller for games.
Right now, I'm using sway on Arch. I have AntimicroX setup to bind a controllers left joystick to mouse, right joystick to scroll, and the buttons to some unused function keys. I also have keyd set up to bind those function keys to combos, which get handled by binds in my sway config. I have it setup so the start button opens my program launcher, the triggers control volume, etc. I chose to do it this way because Kodi/OSMC/Elec do not have a functional web browser, which I need for Piped. I did test using Kodi just for media viewing, but my entire media library (which I currently access with jellyfin) is HEVC, and nothing would play in kodi. I would love to use AV1 instead, but I don't have any hardware than can encode it and software transcoding my whole library would take forever, so I'm limited to using Jellyfin Media Player.
My current upgrade plan is to use Flex Launcher running in cage for a home screen with icons for Firefox, jellyfin, and my games. For web browsing I could use a script that launches AntimicroX+keyd before opening Firefox, so that I can still have controller based web browsing. Jellyfin Media Player supposedly supports gamepads, so that should just work.
Before I set up this mess of an environment, does anyone have any suggestions? Is there an existing solution that supports the features I want? Or if you were setting this up, would you use any different approaches or tools? Thanks!
Edit: I'm not looking for keyboard recs. I already have a mini Bluetooth one for tvs and it's not the experience I'm looking for.
If you want close to the bare minimum of software needed to run a system, and setup everything exactly as you like it, use arch.
If you want a preconfigured system that is performant, stable, secure, but still able to be customized to your liking, use Fedora.
If your scared of using a comand line for installation, use EndeavorOS.
I have used all 3 of these, in some capacity. I run my servers on Fedora Workstation, because it just works and comes with properly configured sepolicies out of the box. Arch has been the daily driver on my desktop/laptops for almost a decade now, because I often like to experiment with new programs and replacements for commonly used software, and the arch wiki is a wonderful. I tried EndeavorOS on an old PC to play YouTube videos/stream on my TV and it worked fine. I had to uninstall a handful of apps it came preloaded with, but that's easy enough with an arch base. But IMO, now that the archinstall tool exists and is officially supported, there is actually no reason to use EndeavorOS unless you really don't want to type a couple commands into a command line.