I’m considering replacing my Nvidia Shield in the future and plan to build a small TV box as its replacement. I’m curious about what operating systems people typically use for these types of TV-specific devices, as well as which desktop environments are preferred. Is KDE or GNOME better optimized for use on TVs?
There are a few JeOS distros out there, usually built around something like Kodi or Jellyfin. I’ve had good experiences with LibreELEC, which (through Kodi) can do audio and video files, broadcast TV, live streams, VOD channels, and even game emulators if the hardware can handle them. It works well on small devices.
When choosing hardware, beware of the fractional frame rate issue: Lots of TV content has a video frame rate that’s a little bit off from the whole numbers usually expected by computers, like 30000/1001 = 29.97002997 fps instead of 30 fps. Support for these frame rates is missing from a lot of systems-on-chip, so small media boxes that use them will have to fake it by dropping or duplicating frames every so often. The result is not smooth.
All the Raspberry Pi models that I’ve checked do support fractional frame rates, so that would be a pretty safe hardware choice.