As others have said, debian is very minimal, so If you would prefer to setup and configure the whole system yourself, debian is a good choice.

Personally, I prefer fedora server. It comes with more things configured out of the box (zram and sysctl configs for example) as well as better security defaults (selinux included with proper policies) and first class support for container infrastructure. Ultimately you could achieve a similar end result with debian, but for my homeservers I prefer to let the fedora team handle most of the system configuration for me.

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.

If your doing this on a pi with raspian, both of these packages should be available. You can run sudo apt install cage cog in a terminal to install both of them.

I don’t know of an OS or distro dedicated to this, but it should be pretty easy using cage-kiosk, a window manager that only allows for a single window, and cog, a very basic web app container.

Install cage and cog on whatever distro you want, setup autologin, then in your ~/.profile add something like

cage -- /usr/bin/cog https://example.com

It should boot directly to the webpage at that point. Make sure to set up ssh before you do all this! System management might get tricky if you dont

Android browsers can provide what are called “Custom Tab Intents”, meaning that other apps can request to open web pages in a webview-like custom tab. This depends on browser support, with WebView being the fallback when your default browser does not support it.

If you’re looking for a chromium based browser, I like Cromite (successor to Bromite). Otherwise, Iceraven and Mull are two Firefox forks for Android that work well in my experience.

Nope, most of the websites I use on my TV are pinned on my home screen, and I have wvkbd (on-screen keyboard) bound to the select key on my controller for the times I do need to type

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.

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

Arch for the last 8ish years. I’m interested in switching to something immutable and with a declarative package manager, but every time I try something else I end up back on arch. It works and has all the packages I use ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Should note that Immich doesn’t have content provider support on Android, so you still need another gallery app to act as a file picker to select images in other apps. Other than that, I love it

Graphene only supports Pixel phones. You could try to port over the device tree, HALs, and build system changes from LineageOS, but you would have to maintain it all yourself and run your own builds. Im using a pixel and I really enjoy graphene, but I’m not sure if it’s worth that much effort

I selfhost SearXNG and route it’s traffic through a VPN. I rarely get blocked by search engines, and when I do I just change the VPN server. You lose the benefit of your data being intermixed with everyone elses on a shared instance, but you still get the other privacy improvements from SearXNG