Newpipe is my Android based YouTube player. I don’t have a Shield, but there are ways to run Android without a Google account. With a phone it’s honestly not worth it because you’re constantly messing around with side loading and stuff, but it may be doable with a TV box.
That said, I have an ancient NUC and run Fedora. It was a bit of a pain, but it’s been years and years and it’s still doing the job, and I’m told that it’s gotten easier with the later releases.
If it is encoded properly, NextCloud links will just play. I’ve sent video to my “Which one is the right click?” Mother.
Mkv won’t play out of the box, but most mp4’s do. I self host, but I have a higher upstream than you do. (I get about 12. Slow, but it does generally work.)
I have an x86 proxmox setup. I stuck a kill-o-watt on it. Keep your pi setup if it does what you want, and realize that there’s someone out there who is jealous of your power bill.
Getting “Linux” support online usually means Ubuntu, but I ran into a Mint problem back in the day (I wanna say about 2014 or so…) And Clem himself replied to me personally with, not just a link to a fix, but an actual “copy and paste this exact thing into the terminal” reply, and it totally fixed me up. Clem being the guy who is in charge of Mint.
Always left me with a warm feeling about Mint, and I keep coming back.
Using LMDE 6 Cinnamon on one of my boxes for that reason.
I once tried to install my Steam Library in Linux to an NTFS partition so I wouldn’t have to install things twice on a dual boot system. Protip: don’t do that.
I really, really wish that the Tweaks and extensions I use were defaults. I always have to mess around for a bit to make Gnome the way I like it.
Almost makes me go KDE. KDE has a lot of defaults I prefer. That said, having to go find the K version of whatever distro makes me a crazy person too. sigh
Do two NICs. I have a bigger setup, and it’s all running on one LAN, and it is starting to run into problems. Changing to a two network setup from the outset probably would have saved me a lot of grief.
I had a Tough Book that I had to run a one-liner script on boot so I could have sound. It was something to do with alsamixer. I remember that I couldn’t get any audio out of the silly thing without that script unless I plugged in and then removed headphones. Loved that machine though!
I hate to recommend Boox,but I have an Onyx Book Poke 3 color, and it’s basically an Android tablet that just pretends to be an e-reader. Any format, any audio, any webpage… Comics too. Had it for years, never let me down. Not as good of battery life as the Kindle, but with Calibre on my laptop and the Boox, I don’t ever pick up the Kindle anyways. Instinctively, I wanna crap on Boox as I don’t like some of their business practices, but the Poke is actually my go to e-reader, so…
As an alternative, I know that there are some e-ink e-readers in a phone sized form factor from a few companies, such as Hisense. Can’t say too much about them as I don’t have one, but half the time I read on my phone because it’s small enough to come with me everywhere. Just a thought.