this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
145 points (99.3% liked)
Asklemmy
47797 readers
1031 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I got a ....don't hit me....GoogleTV "smart" one recently and there's absolutely no BS. With some fiddling one could replace the launcher and then there's really not much left. As to tracking and stuff, there's pihole and no WiFi, just LAN. And they don't even try to escape local DNS.
I explicitly wanted a google one, not some Samsung-shit who add their own garbage on top of Google's garbage.
But the best advice would be to buy the dumbest tv possible (are there even some left?) And then be free to choose which box to add to it. Which might also be google but exchangeable if annoying.
Samsung TVs run Tizen which is their own OS, rather than a skinned Android TV. It's pretty minimal so you need some other box or stick if you want a good watching experience, but it doesn't do anything hostile as long as you turn the tracking bs off at setup, and there are no ads in the UI (at least on the 2019 model my parents have).
There's no truly open source TV OS though :( I miss Firefox OS
Oh I didn't know. Assumed it's just the same shit like their phones and tablets. Crap on top of other crap. But it's still Samsung and I don't trust them either ๐ฅด
Tizen has privacy issues and suggests content on its home screen.
I have my S90D Wi-Fi turned off. Suggested content is still there from when it was previously on the network. Also certain features require an Internet connection, but I don't miss those features with my Apple TV.
I couldn't find any properly dumb tvs in a recent search and got a Google TV. You can set it up in "dumb mode" at startup and it never does a thing online. Can even do firmware vis USB if you felt like it for some reason.
Happy with it so far! 4k and OLED, a decent price imo as well. I'd rather it be fully dumb but this is close enough.
Same. I didn't even find a 1080p anymore, let alone a dumb one. So fucking sad...but I don't ever need a TV at all, it's just for wifey who uses it as background-noise.
And it could be even cheaper without their stupid "smart"-crap. But nooooo. Let's make a TV they maybe can't even use 10 years later anymore.
10 is optimistic imo
Depends on what level of usability of an un-updated android one needs, yes. On a TV I guess it's of less importance. Except you're dependand on apps that constantly update and also their required os-level. Yeah,might've been too optimistic ;-(