Kaigyo

Yeah, I'm surprised too by how little there is for htpc use cases. And I'm bummed by how little development plasma bigscreen has seen.

Oh, honestly most of the software I'm using on it isn't configured through nix. I'm sure I could go a bit further configuring Kodi with it, but the other things like Steam and Firefox wouldn't really benefit.

If I were you, I'd just focus first on getting the base system setup and software installed. Then once you have the software how you like, start porting configuration over to your nix config file(s). That's one of the nice things about NixOS; there's no rush to get everything in a single config file, but you can opt in when it makes sense.

I don't know about hottest, but on my little HTPC I'm running NixOS with KDE (mainly for KDE Connect, but it's nice to have a DE of some sort when things crash/break).

I set up flex launcher to auto start and added menu options for Kodi, Firefox, and Steam.

I used to run LibreElec. It was mostly fine, but the Kodi YouTube plugin breaks just often enough that I wanted to have a web browser as backup. Also, I eventually wanted to play/stream games to it.

Real talk, Fortnite is the only remaining reason I still dual boot into Windows.

I mean, if you're voting within a "first past the post" voting system for a solo position, then yeah you cannot vote outside the two expected, establishment choices and expect it to do anything other than spoil the next candidate you would have chosen.

You have to change the voting system first to something else like ranked choice.

There's a fun little article about it here.

It sorta depends. I've personally had some issues with certain software (mainly Firefox) running in Wayland on my Nvidia card. There are environment variables and flags to remedy some issues, but I'd still get the occasional application crash.

What worked well for me was setting up prime offloading so basically all of the system runs on the integrated GPU and only games run on Nvidia.

Since it's a laptop, for whichever distros you're considering I would absolutely check for any compatibility issues or weirdness others have experienced (things like sleep/wake, power management, wifi, webcam, any other features on the laptop).

What laptop is it?

You're confusing the metaphorical sort of "analogous" with the term "analogous" used in evolutionary biology.

The real cheat sheet:

The best thing I ever did was use Nvidia prime offloading to move everything to my integrated GPU and have only select GPU intensive applications (like games, video editing) interact with Nvidia.

Never had to deal with weird graphics bugs after that.

Right? I made the realization a while ago that refurbished mini PCs are a way better fit for most of my homelab needs.

Sure, if power consumption is your #1 priority then you'd want some ARM solution. But for my use cases, I've found myself fighting with software support and the relatively low computational power of even the newer RPis.

Also, T-series Intel chips (the low power ones) have pretty good idle power consumption and don't spin up the fan too much given their lower power. And a lot of uses cases require sticking a fan and heat sinks on an RPi so you lose the quietness benefit.

Also also, you (still?) need proprietary blobs to use a bunch of the hardware on RPis. You can go full open source on a regular old PC.

Have you considered/tried streaming games from your primary desktop PC? Obviously very dependent on your situation's specifics, but that's one of the things I do with the Linux htpc I have set up.

And then you wouldn't have to worry about games and NAS stuff competing for system resources.

I'd personally go the hypervisor route (I'm using proxmox, truenas, and an *arr stack on my NAS). It keeps things compartmentalized (especially network configurations) and usually keeps me from breaking everything at the same time.