You will be glad to know that HOAs are almost unheard of in the UK and where they exist they’re usually nothing more than an organisation for tending to the village green, common areas and sometimes library book boxes.

Thank you! I’m doing other shit now.

I use plain Arch, but if you are just gonna use it as a media center, use Debian or something like it. A media center doesn’t need to be up to date if you’re just using it for TV and retro gaming. However, how mediocre are we talking? Are you intending to run full steam games or are you planning on streaming them from another computer?

If the latter, I think Debian or even a healthy rPi running RetroPie might be up your alley because you can install Kodi and SteamLink on that.