It’s still in active development, but you might want to keep an eye on Plasma Bigscreen. I’ve been looking for a similar setup to you, and it seems to tick all of the boxes, at least for me.

I only learned about it recently, and I’ve been too busy to try it in that time, but I’ll edit this post with my impressions once I get the time to have a play with it.

Imagine downvoting “Be careful what you expose to the internet”. I thought I’d got away from Reddit.

Well this thread is an absolute shitshow.

Jellyfin is great, but if you refuse to let yourself understand that Plex’s ease of setup for remote access is a point in its favour - especially when sharing with non-tech savvy people - then you’re just as bad as the supposed “Plex shills”.

Plex is well on the enshittification train, and I’ve always been a bit concerned about how private it may or may not be, but there’s absolutely no way I’d have been able to share a Jellyfin instance with my grandfather, especially as his dementia got worse.

I don’t know whether it’s me or my hardware, but display managers seem to absolutely hate me. I’ve tried quite a few, and I’ve always encountered some sort of issue within a few days. Even on distros that install and set them up automatically for me.

Since I’m the only user of my computers, I’ve set mine up to log me in and startx (well, now the Wayland equivalent) automatically, bypassing the DM altogether. If I decide to experiment with other window managers/desktop environments, I just change the line in my bashrc.

If you have a 3D printer that can’t connect to the internet, you could try Octoprint.

I’ve tried some weird and wonderful partition schemes in the past, but I think I’ve settled down and just go for simplicity. Half a gig for /boot, and the rest for / (in ext4). I’ve tried btrfs, but I’ve never been in the position where I needed snapshots, and ext4 is a lot more simple.

I also like having the flexibility of not having a separate home partition. I back up my super important files, so it doesn’t matter if I lose home (not that I distrohop much anymore, anyway). And I don’t have to stress about whether I’ve made my root partition big enough. For the same reason I use a swapfile rather than a swap partition (though I do need to look in to zram and zswap) - I like knowing that I can resize it easily, even if I don’t really plan on doing so.

Any reasonably modern, well maintained desktop distro should be fine; whether they’re “for gaming” or not shouldn’t matter. I’ve successfully run WoW on both Debian Stable and Arch.

I really need to stop being lazy and swap to Jellyfin…

Fedora’s always run really sluggishly for me on whatever hardware I’ve tried it on, so I don’t recommend it in general because my personal experience with it hasn’t been great.

Even ignoring this, I’m not sure I’d recommend it for beginners due to how it tends to jump on the latest hip new software. For some users this is a massive point in Fedora’s favour, but I’m not sure how much I’d trust a beginner to, say, maintain a BTRFS filesystem properly. Not to mention the unlikely, but still present, possibility of issues caused by such new software.

…this looks like it was written by a supervisor who has no idea what AI actually is, but desperately wants it shoehorned into the next project because it’s the latest buzzword.

Fedora was never that great to begin with

I always just found it to be really, really, ridiculously slow. I swear DNF might rival Windows in terms of update slowness and it seems to permeate the whole system.

I built my first PC in a Bitfenix Prodigy. The blue LEDs they used for the power and HDD activity lights were brighter than a thousand suns. I ended up disconnecting them.

such as the GUI installer pamac allowing unsuspecting users to trivially install unvetted packages from the AUR without even a clear indication they may be dangerous

Unless something has changed since the last time I used Manjaro, this isn’t actually true. You have to go relatively deep into Pamac’s settings menu to enable AUR packages, and when you do, a popup comes up telling you what the AUR is and why it might be dangerous (although iirc, it neglects to tell you that an extra reason is Manjaro packages being out of date).

Not that I’m pro-Manjaro, for all the other reasons you’ve given.

Arch.

I’ve done a reasonable amount of distrohopping, but I always come crawling back because I’ve never found anything that can compete with the AUR.

I wanted to go the VM route about a year ago, but I ended up deciding that it was just too much hassle and have kept my Windows dual boot for the extremely rare occasions that I need to use it.

I started out using the GTX 770 from my previous PC as the secondary graphics card to pass through to the VM - which is a lot easier than doing it with a single graphics card - but given how often I actually need to use Windows, I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with the extra power use.

So I decided I’d have a go at single GPU passthrough - which took me probably about six months of on/off (mostly off, admittedly) tweaking to get to a usable state. The first time I managed to boot Windows from my Linux install, I nearly cried. After a while fiddling with it, I decided that, as technologically awesome as it is, it really wasn’t that much different than running it on bare metal. The straw that broke the camel’s back was my inability to get Windows to gracefully hand the GPU back to Linux, despite the fact that it should have been as simple as reversing the steps to give Windows the GPU in the first place.