voidlinux now exclusively. previously: fedora, redhat, gentoo, ubuntu (briefly when it first released), yggdrasil, SLS
No-one mentioned 'jq' yet.
Maybe there's a reason for that!
Last time I looked into Chuwi, there was a lively linux wiki/forum somewhere on their website. There may be clues there and maybe an opportunity to ask a question to their engineers (unofficially, of course).
There's also https://linux-hardware.org/ which might have something.
Just mount the 'remote' file system via NFS (or samba, if you must) and play the media on the 'local' machine as if it were a local file. Done. What am I missing?
I use mythtv (FOSS) and it's fine as a PVR (schedule, record and playback broadcast TV) with a SiliconDust HDHomeRun network-attached tuner. It also has playback for downloaded files but I prefer to use mpv for that. Mine is still connected to the internet and I use firefox/transmission for youtube and other functions.
No idea about plex or jellyfin.
If you're in the US, refurbished thinkpads are probably the best option. Not so much here in Australia (but you mentioned GBP so perhaps you're in UK). Whatever. I bought a refurb Dell Latitude 3120 for AU$229
mfg yr 2021 Intel(R) Pentium(R) Silver N6000 @ 1.10GHz 8Gb RAM Intel UHD graphics Intel Wi-Fi 5 9560 (160 MHz) Bluetooth 5.0 Display: 1366 x 768 11.6" touchscreen 2-in-1 Disc: M.2 256Gb PCIe NVME Class 35 SSD 1.35kg
Runs voidlinux like it was born to it. It's my travel laptop.
It's probably more to do with hardware than distro. That said, using major distros is more likely to win. FWIW I've used fedora and voidlinux on my 3 Dell laptops over the last 12 years with nary a problem. One of them had nvidia but I used nouveau.
voidlinux still has the 390 drivers available. I'm sure others do too:
[-] nvidia390-390.157_6 NVIDIA drivers (GeForce 400, 500 series) - Libraries and Utilities [-] nvidia390-dkms-390.157_6 NVIDIA drivers (GeForce 400, 500 series) - DKMS kernel module [-] nvidia390-gtklibs-390.157_6 NVIDIA drivers (GeForce 400, 500 series) - GTK+ libraries [-] nvidia390-libs-390.157_6 NVIDIA drivers (GeForce 400, 500 series) - common libraries [-] nvidia390-opencl-390.157_6 NVIDIA drivers (GeForce 400, 500 series) - OpenCL implementation