I assume you are using an orange pi successfully? Which version exactly?

Android TV is what I’m trying to escape 😀

Thanks for the suggestions, I guess I’ll look around for a pre-configured Kodi setup, people say that can be good.

I did give plasma bigscreen a try, but overall it seems to be not working well on straight x86 hardware, it’s intended for ARM devices mostly it seems.

I have an old laptop hooked up my tv already, but using the Bluetooth keyboard and TouchPad to navigate traditional desktop focused applications is such a cumbersome activity that both my husband and I never bother to use it, we just grab the remote and use the default tv interface.

I was specifically asking about the remote control and more tv- like interface software. I’ve never managed to get kodi to be anything good, not sure what I’m missing with that but it’s always super clunky and bad to use.

Someone else suggested plasma big screen, I’m going to install and try and get that configured up today, see how it goes.

What’s a good solution for a remote control and “TV like” interface for browsing accessing things? I really just want a good YouTube and jellyfin interface with a normal remote.

Check out openconnect to connect to anyconnect VPNs

I ran it as my primary distro on my main machine for a while way back when. I don’t recommend that.

What I do recommend is going though the entire process even if it’s just in a VM. It’s incredibly educational and will teach you a ton about Linux and OS construction in general. I used to recommend it to everyone I was teaching linux/ Unix too and all the students who actually went through it and completed it now have successful IT careers. 100% an incredibly valuable teaching resource, you will look at all OS’s with new eyes after you’ve built one bit by bit from source by hand.

I prefer FreeLager myself.

Please, not in front of everyone.

I use awk all the time, nothing too fancy, but when you need to pull out elements of text it’s usually way easier than using cut.

awk {’ print $3 '} will pull the third element based on your IFS variable (internal field separater, default is whitespace)

awk {’ print $NF ‘} gets you the last element, and awk {’ print $(NF-1) '} gets you one element from the last, and so on.

Basic usage but so fast and easy for so many everyday command line things.

I really like AppImage, but so far my experiences with flatpak have all been pretty terrible.