what if I got a mini PC to plug into my TV... hmmm... would that be worth it
my main use case would be watching things that are troublesome to watch on the tv itself (like twitch, and downloaded stuff) and maybe some light gaming
but i can already do all those things by plugging in a laptop. this would just be a more convenient way of doing it. at the cost of a) some money and b) adding another device running microsoft freaking windows into my life
@sugar yeah my TV is an android one so it's basically the same as having a Chromecast built in, but even for being one of the most capable smart TV ecosystems it's still so limited and locked down compared to a PC. And the twitch app sucks
@lion You could use Linux instead.
@NekoEd Yeah I think Linux would work for most of what I want to do at least for streaming/media but would lose out on some gaming capability... and if I bought a new mini pc it'd probably come with windows anyway so I would probably resign myself to sticking with it
@lion You could use Bazzite and you'd keep the gaming capability (though an N150 Isn't going to be terribly performant for anything but emulators and very old games)
@NekoEd I was looking at the Ayaneo AM01 which has a 5825U
@lion Oh. It's a bit old by now but not too bad with Linux (it's GCN 5 so no more support on Windows).
@lion For me and my partner, we keep our Steam Deck docked to our TV and in desktop mode with just a small bluetooth keyboard and mouse on the coffee table and it honestly works great for us.
Before we were using an old thinkpad that was showing its age.
Either way I really like it better than using chromecast or whatever or smart TV apps that are so much more limited. Like it's fun for us to put on music via youtube and then just open another browser tab and have that TAS videos twitch channel open and muted and seeing what fun combinations we get which is just impossible without using a computer