Comment by nfriedly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nfriedly | Hacker News Reader

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I had a mid 2011 Mac Mini hooked up to my TV for a while - it was pretty nice overall, although it was the only computer left in my house with a mechanical hard drive.

Rather than upgrade to an SSD, though, I ended up replacing it with a used i3 NUC. (Partially because I wanted to try out the HDMI CEC adapter from Pulse Eight, and partially because the premium from selling the Mac Mini covered the cost of a faster NUC + SSD + CEC adapter with a little bit left over.)

BUT I didn't really use the CEC parts that much, and the Intel sound drivers would "loose" my speakers and start refusing to output sound over HDMI anytime the TV went to sleep, forcing me to reboot the entire computer to get sound again. I ended up giving the NUC to my dad. (The drivers don't seem to exhibit the same bug with his monitor.)

I'm now onto a compute stick + USB sound card (because it had the same HDMI audio bug as the NUC), and I still occasionally wish I had just stuck with the Mac Mini.

Not nearly as elegant of a solution, but I've found that my Pi 3 does a great job of being the 'media box' I've been using my 2nd gen (I think?) Apple TV for. I've been using it with OSMC, wireless keyboard with trackpad, an external hard drive, and an xbox 360 controller. Great little media box. OSMC is dirt simple, I could probably give it to my parents and they'd figure out how to use it pretty quickly.

Of course if I wanted to do computing I'd just use one of the desktop distros.

Yea, I tried that with a first-gen PI and decided it wasn't fast enough, but I imagine the current-gen ones would be.

It also didn't seem quite flexible enough, though - I do a lot of browser-based stuff (Youtube, Netflix, Plex, PBS Video, etc.) And I have a blu-ray drive connected - I usually just rip CDs and movies to my plex server as soon as I buy them, but occasionally I want to play something right away.

And, lastly, I occasionally just use the TV computer to look up random things on the internet.

So, I think I'm stuck with a "real" computer for the time-being (meaning a desktop OS and browser, mostly). A Pi with a regular Raspbian install would probably work, but I've got everything set up and working well at this point, so no reason to change it.

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