Sunspear

I’m looking forward to the Steam Frame, hopefully it’ll support SteamOS out of the box

I’m using Fedora KDE, and for the first time in my life, an upgrade (42 to 43) completely borked the system, in a way that I couldn’t boot to anything else other than a kernel panic.

I had to boot up a live USB, mount and chroot into the old system, and manually fix each duplicated / corrupted package. And it still caused every now and then some weird issue with dnf, so in the end I just reinstalled the entire OS.

I feel like updates “offered” via a nice and convenient gui shouldn’t really do this out of nowhere - and I wasn’t the only one to report this in the past half year.

I second the miniPC suggestions, I have a Dell Optiplex 9020M (bought used for about €70 some two years ago), put an SSD in it plus 8 GB RAM, and it handles anything I throw at it (minus real-time video transcoding).

I use it in a headless way, so YMMV with the video displaying part, but I doubt a Pi would be stronger in this regard.

In any case, I think it’s worth looking around before committing to a Pi, these micro pcs are quite convenient to carry/store/service, and they are self-contained unlike a Pi.

https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/

Here’s the article that started me down this path ^

Edit: I see you’re more into electronics, and I don’t know much about GPIO on these machines, so the laptop may be the simplest solution then - in any case, it’s nice to have options