I control my media pc running Popos with a remote mouse/keyboard combo I found on Amazon and while this works pretty good, I would like a more “big picture mode” like experience that works well with using a remote.
I know theres some distros out there that are geared specifically for a media pc but I don’t wanna reinstall my system. My internet is painfully slow at times and drops out frequently (yay for rural America) so even doing system updates can take a long time or just time out. I’d rather not babysit my pc to get everything working again how i want it so if I could find just a desktop environment to use that would be great. If not, such is life.
So far, Plasma bigscreen looked the most promising: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/ but any recommendations would be helpful. I’ve tried looking some up myself but searching the web has become pretty useless for something more niche or specific like this and I figure the good people on here would have better advice anyways.
I’ve gone the other way - there is no interacting per se with the media PC; instead, it’s a dumb sink that plays back everything you send it, by way of macast and jellyfin-mpv-shim. you use android apps to send it stuff (e.g. newpipe share to allshare which connects to macast and jellyfin android app which connects to JMS) and to control playback (pause, skip, change subs, etc.). so, all media selection and playback control is done from the mobile device, no need to touch the media PC doing the playback.
not sure this will fit into your use case because of spotty internet, but that should prompt you to install jellyfin post-haste. then you have two options, the mentioned android app + JMS or just the jellyfin media player which can run in TV mode with a pared down controller (up/down/left/right/enter/back) - I’ve successfully repurposed an ancient Apple Remote that has just those six keys.