I’m mostly sailing the high seas, using the tv as a giant monitor for the always-on laptop connected to it. I’m afraid of the 1984-esque “You must connect to the internet to continue using this TV” that might come after some time.
Its silly how many people are proposing dumb TVs as something better ore something you need to hold on to at all costs. Get a TV with a screen that suits you and connect some playback device via HDMI or such. Kodi, custom entertainment PC, android TV, whatever. The tips about pihole are not good either. Its not a firewall with DPI, just a dns blocker. If the TV uses hardcoded IP then you are shit out of luck. And it bet they do.
It’s not that a dumb tv offers better viewing quality, it’s that it needs to start an OS and an interface to navigate, injecting ads and whatnot, while a dumb tv will start in an instant and only outputs what is connected to its physical inputs.
My LG TV (not connected to the internet) lets you disable all startup icons and sounds. It goes from off to on in about 2 seconds and goes straight to the last used input. I think I’ve seen the home screen once in the 8 months that I’ve had it.
