Personally I use Bazzite and I think it is great.
I operate four PCs in my day-to-day, which may seem excessive, but I choose to solve most computing problems with PCs (no smart TV). My HTPC, which I drive with Bazzite, primarily serves as a fireplace/ light media/ light gaming setup. Bazzite is uniquely well configured for this purpose. It brings the stability of a Fedora-based, Atomic OS, but leaves behind the codec and media issues Fedora can introduce. The tinkering one would generally need to do with Steam comes pre-configured, like you may be used to with SteamOS on Steam Deck. ExpressVPN works, but requires terminal in my configuration (I believe I could operate it through a GUI if I were so inclined). Bazzite does a great job of being configurable to serve TVs that need scaling and safe zones.
Fireplace PC Specs for the Nebby:
Ryzen 5700g
beQuiet! cooler
A320MH motherboard (bios flashed for Cezanne compat)
16 GB DDR4 3200
2 TB SSD
1 TB HDD
beQuiet! 500W PSU
A friend gave me their old gaming laptop, it was mid-range when she bought it, and she didn’t use it anymore. I stuck bazzite on it, and I really like the experience! I’m no stranger to Silverblue, so some of the atomic host stuff was already old hat to me, but I was impressed by how much worked straight out of the box. It’s kinda become my retro gaming go-to device.
Yeah that sounds like a basically perfect use-case.
About tree fiddy.
5700G gives me PTSD. HP somehow figured out a way to make it pointless. Seriously, a single VGA out? When this was presented to me at work after saying “you know, for our use case, these N100 boxes look really appealing,” my boss apparently thought that computing ability scales with cost. That’s part of the reason I don’t work there anymore.
