Made me think of the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.

Shudder. I had this weird brand laptop… Sotec IIRC and there just wasn’t a modline that ever got it all right.

Xserver… Somehow trying to find the magic string of letters and numbers that made your screen work.

The trouble for me was always getting people to use the controllers. I had some success with some family members using bubbleupnp on their Android phones. But the separation between sources, renderers and controllers is a little confusing for non technical people

DLNA is going to be your best bet, but it’s such a deep and convoluted rabbit hole. There’s a lot of ways to configure a setup.