What team? He wrote he was the only one working on Nova for the past year.

LOL! It’s a blogging platform called Bear Blog: https://bearblog.dev/

It goes from 3% slower to 30% faster.

Yes, Kodi (via LibreELEC) and then JellyCon on top.

For other Amlogic ARM devices, like the Minix U22X-J (Max) or Ugoos AM6+ I mentioned above, CoreELEC is the LibreELEC alternative.

Chances are very high that Kodi will detect your own TV’s remote and you can use that! https://kodi.wiki/view/CEC
If that doesn’t work, there are many cheap options.

I also use the official JellyFin client on my android phone with MPV as player and that also works perfectly fine. And the Jellyfin Media Player on my laptop is also flawless.

In my experience, the older Chromecasts are probably the only clients with problems.

If I had to buy a client device, I’d probably go with a Minix U22X-J (Max) or Ugoos AM6+ https://discourse.coreelec.org/t/amlogic-ng-and-dolby-vision/24738

I’ve been using Jellyfin for over 2 years. My main clients are a Raspberry 4 and a Raspberry 5 using Kodi + the Jellyfin plugin. This combo has been flawless.

I also have an older Chromecast and I experience there similar problems with subtitles.

MX Linux is a nice Debian based distro that still supports 32-bit. Or you could use just Debian.

Python 3.14 Release Schedule: https://peps.python.org/pep-0745/

3.14.0 final: Wednesday, 2025-10-01

Python / FastAPI will be better than Java in your situation and is easy to learn. Go should be even better and is also relatively easy to learn!

I own two Raspberries 1, a Raspberry 4 8GB and a Raspberry 5 8GB. I wouldn’t recommend the 4 as a full-fledged desktop replacement, but the 5 has been very smooth so far.

I’m currently using the latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite and installed KDE on top.

I was lucky then with the 4 A400 I’m still using. I also have 3 BX500 that have been very reliable.

Kingston A400s and Crucial BXs have been very good as cheap SSDs in my experience.

A VPN would be my first choice. ZeroTier works like a charm on the RPis. I’ve shared even SQLite databases over Samba over Zerotier among a bunch of RPis daily for a couple of years without a hitch.

My own example. I still have an ancient netbook lying around. It runs on an Intel Atom N270, which is only 32bit / i386. It came with Windows XP and I quickly switched to Mint, when it was still supporting 32bit.

I think the last Ubuntu release supporting i386 was 18.04 (around 2018) and all other distros started to drop i386 support after that.

AFAIK Debian is the only major distro still fully supporting i386. And a Debian based distro that still supports i386 is MX Linux. My ancient and crappy netbook is running MX Linux right now.

My ‘weird’ example. I have a Raspberry 5! It’s ARM and very new. It runs its own distro, Raspberry Pi OS (Debian based), and Ubuntu does also fully support it. Right now if you try some other distro, it probably won’t even boot unless you start tinkering a lot with it.

So Debian is definitively a choice for very old hardware. And the odd ARM SoC has usually at least some custom Ubuntu build that runs with it.

TalkPython episode about Memray: https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/425/memray-the-endgame-python-memory-profiler

PyQT / PySide are huge, but they have been very good in my experience coding cross platform desktop programs. macOS, Windows and Linux (even on ARM) are very well supported.

I use VSCode for coding, but if it’s a small script or pure text files, then I use Geany.

I’ve been following this project for a while and it’s great. They are just not great at promoting it.

Easiest solution, use the Jellyfin client on your phone and use that to stream to your Chromecast.

If you want to use just your PC, then you need to be able to access your Jellyfin over HTTPS. Search a bit and you’ll find tutorials for this, but you’ll have some work ahead of you. Doing all this through your smartphone is much easier.

I’ve used Linux since the mid 90s, but I switched to Linux as my desktop daily driver just 2 years ago and I went with Manjaro. I was prepared to switch to a pure Arch setup, but I’m still vary happy with Manjaro. I use AUR, but only very few packages.