Hey all! I’m planning on redoing my setup on my PC hooked up to my TV. What I have now works, but I want something a little more streamlined. I mainly use it for watching videos on Piped (YouTube frontend) and tv/movies in Jellyfin, but I recently set up Sunshine/Moonlight for game streaming, and my current setup doesn’t allow me to use my existing controller for games.
Right now, I’m using sway on Arch. I have AntimicroX setup to bind a controllers left joystick to mouse, right joystick to scroll, and the buttons to some unused function keys. I also have keyd set up to bind those function keys to combos, which get handled by binds in my sway config. I have it setup so the start button opens my program launcher, the triggers control volume, etc. I chose to do it this way because Kodi/OSMC/Elec do not have a functional web browser, which I need for Piped. I did test using Kodi just for media viewing, but my entire media library (which I currently access with jellyfin) is HEVC, and nothing would play in kodi. I would love to use AV1 instead, but I don’t have any hardware than can encode it and software transcoding my whole library would take forever, so I’m limited to using Jellyfin Media Player.
My current upgrade plan is to use Flex Launcher running in cage for a home screen with icons for Firefox, jellyfin, and my games. For web browsing I could use a script that launches AntimicroX+keyd before opening Firefox, so that I can still have controller based web browsing. Jellyfin Media Player supposedly supports gamepads, so that should just work.
Before I set up this mess of an environment, does anyone have any suggestions? Is there an existing solution that supports the features I want? Or if you were setting this up, would you use any different approaches or tools? Thanks!
I use a Logitech K830 with my HTPC. It’s not the cheapest but it’s been reliable for 10+ years. It’s backlit and uses a USB WiFi dongle.
If you want something small and low price, the Rii i4 has mushy keys but gets the job done. I mainly use that with my Steam Deck but it connects to almost anything USB (WiFi dongle) or Bluetooth.
I have a bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo, and the experience is not good. If I wanted to use a computer, I’d just sit at my desktop. I’m mostly looking for gamepad/controller driven software, but I appreciate the reply.
https://www.amazon.com/Keyboard-Trackball-Wireless-Multimedia-Receiver/dp/B083M5TN6N
I use this with gnome. It’s pretty great.
No controller support needed, interact with all applications as needed. Type when necessary
I have something similar to this, but 99% of the time I don’t need a keyboard, just a mouse and a couple specific keys. Would much rather use a controller personally
For the sake of anyone who finds this looking for a proper answer, SteamOS/Bazzite/ChimeraOS are all suitable for this purpose. I didn’t consider them when writing this because I thought they were primarily game focused, but for non-games like Jellyfin or a web browser, you can just add them to your steam library as non-steam games.
