I remember trying the Android TV 14 image a while ago and it was basically unusable as you describe, the new Android TV 15 image has fixed virtually all those issues for me. YMMV but IMO it’s worth experimenting and seeing if it works for you, there’s a chance I just got lucky though
I’m currently using a raspberry pi 5 flashed with Konstakang’s Android TV image, it works pretty flawlessly and takes less than an hour to set up, assuming you have the APKs of everything you want to install. You don’t need to mess around with Google play services because most TV android apps are also designed to run on firesticks which don’t have it.
The one issue I have encountered is that the Jellyfin client very occasionally won’t play some 4k HDR media in the default player (all my 1080p stuff works fine) so I also installed MPV and I turn on alternative player in the Jellyfin settings in the rare case something doesn’t work.
Zen is based on Firefox, it supports 100% of firefox addons, as well as supporting its own community mods system for changing the browser itself
Zen is literally the best browser around right now, I do understand the UI isn’t for everybody but if you vibe with it, it rocks
I use sunshine and moonlight using a pi 5 running Android TV as the client. It works perfectly for the occasional video stream but latency for games is a bit rough. You’ll probably be fine playing something relaxed like Stardew Valley but platformers (I’ve tried Ultimate Chicken Horse) and racing games (Mario Kart Wii running in Dolphin) are just bad enough to be unplayable. This is with both devices connected over Ethernet (albeit through a powerline adapter and my router is fairly cheap) so WiFi will probably be worse.
Not sure if sunshine and moonlight just have loads of overhead or if there’s a part of my setup causing the latency.
I use Glutun for this
I would recommend you use Zigbee2MQTT instead of the built-in ZHA. It seems to play nicer with certain devices. I also used the dimmer switch method to reset a hue bulb I had and it connected perfectly.
Framework 16 does have a dedicated GPU option, and it’s upgradable.
Here’s a wildcard people might not know about: Raspberry Pi Imager
I use it because it’s faster than Etcher and it also has a bunch of quick links to download popular images (mainly for RPI and other arm-based SBCs) in one click which is handy if you use those regularly.
I recently set up Fedora Kinoite on my dad’s laptop for him and he seems very happy with it. Kinoite is the atomic/immutable version with KDE Plasma by default. Once I’d set up a couple of things everything else he needs can be installed with flatpak (just make sure to set Flathub as the default and disable the Fedora flatpaks repo that ships broken packages all the time)
… My vacuum actually does run Linux.
!It’s a roborock with Valetudo installed so it doesn’t need internet access!<
The average person has a 1tb+ drive and doesn’t care about a few hundred megabytes of bloat in a partition they will never look at. If someone is switching from Windows, every app having its dependencies self contained is mostly normal anyway (aside from the occasional system provided dll). The only people likely to care about removing old flatpak platforms are the kind of people who don’t mind running the command to remove them.
Why not use Waydroid?
“Critical thinking skills only count if they’re MY critical thinking skills” do they not see the irony?
Honestly, good for you. I switched about a year and a half ago after using Windows literally all my life (well, from when I was 5 years old in primary school anyway).
Never looking back. I now know what a good PC experience is like. One that doesn’t bombard you with ads for its own browser and requests to track you every time it stops in the middle of what you were doing to force an update that only makes your experience worse.
I personally use Nobara on my main PC and OpenSuse on my laptop, but whatever you go with, I wish you a good time. (And know that if you don’t, there’s always a distro out there that will fit your usage better!)