How much work do you want to do?

None - Librelec is already configured for media center usage. Install and use.

Little - Fedora IOT. Set up the system, which has a small core, verify you've got the right drivers, plasma bigscreen, your media apps.

Lots - Arch linux. Same thing, set up the small core (manually), then handle drivers, plasma bigscreen, your media apps.

Lots (But I don't like systemd). Go Void. It's the same as arch (more or less) but you use runit instead of systemd.

Full Control. Go Gentoo. This is probably overkill here unless you've got some kind of restrictions to meet. You know your needs best.

If you care at all about HDR support (or in the future) that's a good DE pick as well. They recently improved support / specification adherence so now mpv works correctly with HDR finally.

But a minimum of 8Gb RAM for a simple media PC seems pretty high. I don't want bloat -- or an OS that requires a discrete GPU. This seems like a good choice for a gaming setup, not a low-spec media file player.

As long as people say why it's their favorite, that's fine. In this case, I believe openSUSE is great for you -- but I need a bare-bones media file player that I will use for nothing else, so (for this) I can discard it. ;]

Everyone is going to recommend their distro :P.

My new home is openSUSE tumbleweed. So you can have a stable hybrid server/gaming desktop :)

Use Bazzite. It's unbreakable and comes with lots of easy installable packages. And I say that as a looong-time Debian fan.

I think this is the way I'm going to go. I think KDE Plasma seems pretty cool, maybe Big Screen it.

Well if you are familiar with servers I'd can't stop myself from shilling the setup i use, you install mint, then you set up i3 as the window manager, 500mb of ram on idle, I set it up in a 4gb ram laptop and runs beautifully, stable and never breaks too.

For something like this, I would just run Debian. (Use whatever DE you're comfortable with)

Mount the NAS share through fstab and install mpv as a media player.

I have a super old lenovo nuc that I use for the same purpose. I ended up putting Linux mint with xfce on it and it works great. Not the fastest for sure but def usable

slightly simpler than parsing zdump: just compare the zone's UTC offset now with 7 days ahead and 7 days ago. save this as ~/bin/dst.sh and chmod +x it:

#!/bin/sh
now=$(TZ="$1" date +%z)
[ "$now" != "$(TZ="$1" date -d '+7 days' +%z)" ] && echo "change soon"
[ "$now" != "$(TZ="$1" date -d '-7 days' +%z)" ] && echo "just changed"
exit 0

then next to each clock put something like ${execi 3600 ~/bin/dst.sh America/New_York}. it prints nothing the rest of the time, and right now it says "just changed" for Europe/London and "change soon" for New York, so it seems to work.

Thanks, I'll try working on that after sleep, brain no work right now. :)

TIL that conky has a $tztime variable.

Even so I can confidently say that conky alone cannot do this.

However, you can insert the output from scripts, so something like Switching daylight savings on/off: ${execi 100 /path/to/script} will work.

For the script, I believe zdump is your friend. Start with something like

$ zdump -i Europe/London|grep ^$(date +%Y)-  
2026-03-29      02      +01     BST     1  
2026-10-25      01      +00     GMT  

These lines mark "time intervals". More info: man zdump

Your system should keep the tzdata package up-to-date so there's usually no reason to check it externally.

I don't know about Conky, but I wanted to make sure you are aware that there is a Linux package with all the DST information, tzdata. So, you can query that for all your time zone information (including DST transitions)

https://samanpavel.medium.com/time-zones-tz-database-and-linux-8dd9d451caa4

Timezones and DST are set by the respective countries so it's possible for them to change. IANA directly maintains tzdata so if there are any changes the update should come quickly, but you would need to be aware to go and get it.

Mint is awesome, and normally that's my goto for newer Linux users, and honestly even experienced ones. But it might be a little heavy for a system as old as yours.

Let me know if Mint ends up running alright for you, I'm curious to know!

Looking for GUI. Want to autofill. Desktop app cannot do that?

bitwarden CLI does integrate with some other tools. Almost every launcher, ulauncher, rofi, elephant, has a bitwarden cli plugin that integrates with bitwarden cli

Have a look at VanillaOS it is immutable but far more flexible than stuff like silver blue

I'm switching my Nixos system to Immutable , and it should be simple because /nix is pretty much the only directory you actually need in order to boot and run the system.

Awesome, welcome to the club :) always fun to get new linux users, and also always great to find new uses for old hardware.

Thanks! I want to give these a shot after Mint finishes updating. Any edge will be noticeable.

I was worried about USB boot, but it went smoothly.

Spot on! Before wiping, Vista showed the last update to be ~June '06.
Sadly, it's not as impressive in the ports as I initially thought (didn't know what I was looking at).
Not real sure what I'll end up doing with it. It's in good condition.

I took your advice. Mint and XFCE have been good to me thus far, so I went for it.
Very thankful I didn't have to burn a DVD for it. I've done it before, but Ventoy is so much more convenient.

I was worried 32-bit would be necessary, but 64 went okay. It is slow, but I was expecting that. It's quieter now though, and it shuts down faster.

It took awhile, but it worked. Ventoy on USB drive. First had to take a video to see the Post screen in order to determine which F button to press (F9:boot order). After that no problems, just waited.

Turns out I just didn't realize what some of the 'ports' were; abandoned monitor connections and a little remote control that slides out. There's a DVD drive and headphone jacks, which I like. I am curious about Expandable Port 3, though. There's a command that lists them isn't there?

Didn't really have much of a plan for it. I'm not sure what use case it's best suited for. Tempted to give it as a gift.

I have a device with 2gb of ram with mx linux, and it works fine. Here's a few tips for any distro when using such configuration:

1 - if possible, enable multilib and run 32-bit versions from your heavier software, like the browser (the entire system as 32 bit helps a lot, but most distros seem do be dropping it)
2 - use zram
3 - in the browser, look for some form of tab suspender addon
4 - try alternative lightweight software for your stuff (for example, abiword instead of libreoffice)
5 - block ads in your network, to prevent the device to even process them
6 - don't use the browser to wathc videos. Look for native players. In fact, avoid doing anything in the browser and look for native software when possible

I find it quite fun to use a constrained device like that, and it helped me change a few habits I considered to be bad for me, as well as it helped me focus more on my important stuff