not to rain on the parade or nothing, but a protest that hasn't the implicit threat of "...or else" is just a hang
glitching
anyone got the tvdb or whatever link for ITV1's "America’s Veterans: The War Within"? can't find it
kodi and its derivatives are not something you should be using. it's shit software on so many levels and we should burn it in the deepest volcanos we got.
try one of these:
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run lineageOS TV (konstakang images) on it and install regular ATV apps for the services mentioned. so, like googletv except there's no spying and ads and shit.
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create a normal linux box that has a DLNA sink e.g. using macast. there's no remote control, you use your android/iOS device to send it stuff, like movie from Jellyfin or a youtube video, and it plays it back and allows some control (pause, play, rew/ff, etc)
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dedicated Jellyfin box; same as 2) but boots right into jellyfin client. it can be run in TV mode where it reacts to only up/down/left/right/enter/back, via gamepad or remote controller. if yours isn't recognised, you can emulate it with InputRemapper.
not familiar with how twitch does stuff.
you also have the option of installing a normal raspi distro and then using a wireless keyboard and mouse/touchpad to run it, but I am of the opinion that once the device gets placed by the TV, it loses all keyboard and mouse privileges and should only be operated via the TV's remote.
I have no alternative but used phone + lineageOS; the stuff you're mentioning (new phone with whatever crap they installed on there) isn't even on my radar as an option.
as to longevity, it's a stop-gap to hold us over until postmarketOS or any of its brethren are ready. banking on the benevolence of evilcorp to give us this thing for free for ever isn't a viable strategy.
eons ago I heard and internalised an awesome phrase: "don't analyze the problem - solve it".
in that vein, install it yourself and ship the laptop to him. don't matter what it cost, it's not like it's gonna bankrupt you and it's not like you're gonna do this multiple times per year.
you're 100% in control of everything and that's the next best thing to being there and doing it for yourself. you're gonna figure out how to remotely do half of the things you mention across CGNATs and whatnot? I am sure you got better things to do; I know dad has.
your phone isn't booting a linux desktop. it's booting a java virtual machine and within it a whole stack and within it the stuff that behaves like a desktop environment and all that from shit-slow, unreliable storage.
honestly, with the whole chain it's amazing that everything boots and runs so well.
we had the centralised model (big corpos hosting all of the stuff) because our devices were shit and internet access was rare and precious. nowadays, with ever-present internet, when my $50 pocket computer has 8 cores and 8 GB RAM, the laptop many times that, let alone the desktop, we should be moving to Pied Piper's vision of a decentralised internet and dedicate all of our resources to that goal.
I've been a part of the fediverse some while now and I admit, I didn't understand it fully. I operated under the premise that whoever put this thing together and then spent their time and energy promoting it has thought this through and then seeing more and more people jumping on, I took it as validation of that idea.
a few years down the road, I have a better understanding, and I don't really like it. it's wasteful and disorganized and I don't see a way where some order out of this chaos emerges.
I thought it's a sort of fail-over distribution of content. so if lemmy.bing is offline/gone, you can interact with lemmy.ding or lemmy.bong and access all data and post and comment and whatnot. not so, when ding is gone, it's gone. its radiated content may be present on other instances, but still there's a ton of issues that way.
instead, I believe a decentralised and distributed system, with no single point of failure, no admins spending their hard earned cash on maintaining lemmy or mastodon instances or, god forbid, dedicated hardware in the vein of i2p or similar, should be the end goal.
very cool, top of the line, if the battery is in good condition, it'll serve you a long time. wish lenovo went with 2x RAM slots, not just 1x. keep a lookout for cheap docks if you wanna run it with external stuff (monitors, LAN, etc.) - game changer.
heads-up, although it says 4750, that's a 3000-series Ryzen (Zen 2) and as such has intermittent linux issues wrt power management. a coupla kernel switches and/or other tweaks may be needed, dependent on the kernel your distro's using. sold mine a while ago so can't remember the deets, but overall the switches I needed for Zen 2 to reliably sleep and wake aren't needed for Zen 3 (5000 series).
try the archive https://web.archive.org/web/20250613134705/https://thelibre.news/actually-what-is-a-freedesktop-portal/
whoever configured thelibre web server should be replaced, at the very least. loads as if it's on the dark side of the moon.
edit: cool article though
"my foot itches, what's the best shotgun I can get to blast it off". this is like problemXY.
a 2-year old ex-flagship is a beast of a device. how do I know? because I run a 7-year old not-flagship and it's a beast. you tear google's shit out and keep using it. you can even keep using GCam with a "yeah-playservices-is-present" faker and then disable GCam's network access.
Google is an adversary. start treating it as such.
is as scam. if you're already receiving unsolicited shit, what's the thought process behind being courteous with them motherfuckers? go nuclear on them, that whole industry lost its benefit of doubt privileges a decade ago.