that's a hella rad machine to convert because of something so easily fixable. could be due to a loose cable, or needs a new panel; provided it ain't of the ultra-spensive variety, 2nd hand laptop panels can be had for like $20-50 from your local junker. short of that, converting it to a full desktop would be the next best use case. using a hexacore ryzen with 3050ti as "media PC" is fucking bonkers, a potato can handle that.

when I was running my Oneplus 6T with a heavily degraded battery on pmOS, I got days of standby out of it, while Android couldn't last 12 hours. in both cases I ran it without modem/cell connectivity, just wifi. degoogled android, no microG no nothing. still, no way it could do sunrise to sundown.

on pmOS, when I press the power button, the thing went into standby. didn't do shit in the background nobody asked it to, didn't sync to no clown, nothing. for me that was perfect. your use case might be different.

can you expand on what hardware you're running, namely eGPU box, GPU and laptop/miniPC. did you have cable issues? also, how's the hot dock/undock situation?

bet you $100 it won't?

you can load any live USB to RAM, if you got enough of it. use rd.live.ram (fedora) or toram (debian/ubuntu) and you can remove the USB afterwards and have a superfast "install"

bluetooth remote controls, I run a NOCTUS. apple IR ones (the little white ones from the iPod days) with IR receiver out of a defunct Macbook (those are USB). game controllers, any kind.

Jellyfin player's UI in TV mode reacts only to up/down/left/right and enter and escape. you can use InputRemapper if your weapon of choice isn't recognized. also, jellyfin android apps connect to the player directly and you can control it from there.

fine learning experience, but this thing does nothing you'd use your TV for.

the cheapest and best solution is to grab a busted-up laptop from your marketplace. broken screens, keyboards, missing batteries, whatever, you won't use none of those things. make sure it's skylake (6th gen) or newer for hardware video acceleration and on-board LAN and HDMI, the rest is unimportant. you'll have an insanely powerful and power-efficient platform that you control 100% of and can tweak to your heart's desire, expand, fix, etc. I'd be surprised if you can't find several for under $40, power brick included.

my go-to setup is auto-launching jellyfin player in TV mode with macast running in the background (DLNA sink you can send youtube videos and the like). since you'll have computing power to spare, this can also be a server, whatever you desire.

this used to be a job for raspberries, but them things are insanely expensive now and necessitate ever more expensive shit. please don't even joke about letting noname android boxes loose on your LAN.

I imagine most people here already know this, but - you don't really need anything but git installed on the server. you can create a repo, push to it, pull off it, branch, merge, do whatever you can with the cli, all that web GUI is just optional. integrates just fine with vscode and clones.

so if you don't need a web UI, a truly lightweight solution is already preinstalled.

I got the DODI repack and it works fine in lutris

debootstrap handles that, arch-install-scripts has got a lot of helpful tools. after the initial install, you arch-chroot to it and install stuff you want, via apt, tasksel, etc.

very cool. wanted to do exactly that something similar with a Lenovo Ideapad I found. except, I don't want to buy the adapter board, I just wanna utilise the existing two SATA ports in the laptop; one HDD, one DVD. haven't figured a zerospend way to do that, as the SATA ports on the MB are female, as are the cables.

second, don't wanna use an external PSU, there's gotta be a way to get 12 V off the board somehow or use a step-down module from, say, backlight?

does acer have a power-on on AC setting in the setup or do you have to power it on manually?

this concerns both btrfs and zram, so this would be a huge boost?