I’m doing a very similar thing with an old Dell thin client. I did inherit a large server from a company that was upgrading, but I’ve been thinking about downsizing a lot lately so now I use a few small computers on a 10 inch rack.
the best server is one that you already have
As someone that aggressively takes advantage of the prime gaming giveaways, heroic launcher has been nearly perfect for all the random games that I’ve received on epic/amazon/gog.
I hate how good bazzite is at just being a game console. But then there’s lots of little Fedora ublue things in there that are useful. Like the fact that it has podman by default makes running silly things like ollama so easy.
Roku TV has been unbearable lately. There’s a whole row of ads before I even get to the physical inputs on the TV. Plus there is a full height ad on the right and a half height ad on the left.
I think they mean no ads in the UI. There are still ads in the YouTube app since Google needs that revenue. Ads don’t take up approximately 50% of the home screen though like they do on a Roku TV.
I don’t have the quantitative metrics, but I will say that I had the flu last year and I just laid on the couch with my steam deck and streamed cyberpunk using Moonlight. The latency was imperceptible to my flu brain, and it was a much better experience than playing for an hour at a much lower quality natively on the deck. I have a friend who also streams his desktop to his Apple TV (hardwired desktop, wireless Apple TV) and he beat metal gear solid V like that.