[Robbie Ferguson]

For the "pizzaz" effect Sasha's looking for, I first thought of Debian Stretch with the Cinnamon UI??  That seemed pretty snazzy to me, and something I've been wanting to load up myself.  

I personally love Debian, but I'm a bit of a hardcore Linux user. My concern with Debian mostly surrounds 1) Video driver complexity and 2) Steam. For these two reasons, I wonder if leaning more toward a flavor of Ubuntu would be better. Thoughts? Especially with them going back to Gnome... it's appealing. It'd be nice to hear from some die-hard Steam users as to what works best. I'm also not a gamer.

I'm not a gamer, per se, so I can't speak to those needs, but with that 4K TV sitting there I can't imagine hi-def movies won't be in the mix.  Depending on what other home theater peripherals live in her living room, I'd say some method to play blu-ray/4K/HDR media is a must!!  There's some streaming content available, but I think optical media is still the most solid choice.

I tend to disagree... I figure they'll play Bluray disks with their Bluray player. No point in adding expense to the PC build for a redundant component. To me, the only valid reason to have an optical drive up until a few years ago was to be able to burn disks. Since you can buy CD's in MP3/AAC form, movies and TV shows are online, games and other software are now distributed pretty much exclusively online, and Linux is installed from USB sticks, I can't think of a valid use for them... unless burning something for some reason, which these days is unwise since, for example, burning a home movie to DVD would significantly reduce its quality. Will have to see what Sasha thinks?

On the subject of storage, I was wondering if some sort of NAS might be worth considering??  Maybe this is Phase 2, but I was thinking about something inexpensive for storage and backup like a Raspberry Pi running (maybe) OpenMediaVault??  I'm interested to know if anyone has experience with that distro??

Yes on both points: yes a NAS unit would be awesome - not so much for storage (they're not networking after all... it's just one computer), but more for a backup solution. That said, we have plans in the works already (I was speaking with Jeff about this after the show Wednesday) to do a show on OpenMediaVault on a Pi. Sounds like we've got a winner on our hands!