My main concern is replacing the remote, because bluetooth on linux is quite awful.
Im guessing run kodi is the other solution? I want the SO to be able to use it as easily as the smart tv, which is of course riddled with ads and downloading random shit on my network that I hate (20 gigs to Disney + in a month. I dont have any subs. Wtf is it downloading? I blocked it now ofc)
For reference, trying to axe the smart tv and use my atari vcs with mint on it to fulfill those needs. It should have the power and I want to keep the sleek look and not have an actual pc in the room.
I don’t have much issues with Bluetooth in Linux, works just fine on my Kodi installs, audio, remotes the whole kit. But I can recommends the G60S Pro remote. It has both 2.4Ghz and Bluetooth so you don’t have to rely on the Bluetooth if you don’t want to. Flip it and it has a keyboard, incredibly useful!
Before that I ran CEC remotes (found is kind of meh), IR receiver (worked fine enough), and other 2.4Ghz remotes (MX3 variants, including a Bluetooth one).
I also use the companion phone app, Kore, on a Android.
Like others here I’ve been running Kodi for nearly 20 years, has amazing spousal approval rate. I just redid my setup, PXE boot a couple of Pis and an x86_64 machine (and Qemu for testing) it’s a bit of a pain to share more than the libraries (my MySQL), but that’s really more than most people want anyway (and I did manage to share almost everything with some NFS trickery, advance config path substitution, bind mounts, etc).