Projectivy launcher, problem ~~solved~~ adequately duct taped.

Stop connecting your TVs directly to the internet, I don't care what OS it's running. The trend is clear with TV manufacturers, and if your current TV OS doesn't yet inject ads into your streaming box's HDMI stream, why risk it updating? Because that's coming soon enough, and I imagine what it does, an update requiring your TV to have internet connection won't be far behind.

I recently bought a projector that I had to trick into not connecting to Wifi by telling it that it was connected to ethernet until it gave up. It will never know the wifi password. It gets an HDMI signal, it shows the HDMI signal, that is its purpose.

are there custom ROMs for TVs like there are for Android phones?

I just don't connect my Hisense to the Internet, and let my Nvidia Shield TV do all the "Smart" stuff. 🤷‍♂️

I have a TCL ROKU TV which is way too chatty on my network. It sends every single keypress on the remote to their servers (just look into the dev console which is easy enough to see what is logged). I have an adblock dns server on my network

These are just in the last 23 minutes of the hour. As I understand, it's not always doing this if they are not blocked, but when you block them, it starts to panic!

The advantage of doing this is instead of having the ad on the right side of the home menu, I have a nice translucent adbox with nothing in it.. Also, if you look up the secret codes for Roku menus, you can also toggle the ad server they use so sometimes if some slip through, you get some in house tested ones which are sometimes funny. But that's extremely rare for us.

Our next TV will probably be a display or offline only and be a streaming box with custom firmware such as Librelec or something else when the time comes.

The author of the article is under the mistaken impression that bundling the "smart" features into the TV increases the price. It's actually the opposite.

By injecting ads and bloatware into the TVs, the manufacturers earn more money, by far, than the cost of the features. A dumb TV would cost more.

The best solution is to decouple them; get the cheapest TV you can with the video quality/size you want, then attach your own device to stream content. I use a modified Fire Stick due to price, mostly with Stremio/Torrentio/Debrid, but there are lots of options.

Don't connect them to the internet. Problem solved.

These smart tvs just suck. All these integrated systems. Much better off having a seperate device like Roku or Chromecast.

I have an old laptop with Linux Mint hooked to my TV. Firefox with some bookmarks to different streaming services, Freetube with subscriptions, sunshine/moonlight to my gaming PC and emulators to play some retro adventures with my kids. I remote controll it with KDE Connect from my phone. Works great!
I used to fiddle with Kodi on a Raspberry Pi, but the laptop is so simple and easy to set up, I don't see myself going back.

Just buy a computer monitor

I am still using a dumb LG TV from the before times, and love it. I fear the day that I need to replace it.

I have my Google TV in apps only mode. If Google can still see that I pirate literally everything I watch, and circumvent YouTube ads with it then, well, maybe it sends a message.

If it was dumb then how would it collect your data and show you ads?

Anyway modern TVs are expensive to produce to they artificially lower the price by making money elsewhere. (Just look at the buttons on your remote)

If you want a dump TV you could look into digital signage. Spoiler: it is $$$$$

Is there a consensus that Sony tvs are better due to android TV on them?

I would use a smart tv if it ran entirely on a raspberry pi compute module that I provide running only software I explicitly installed on it (like an intigrated computer only with a raspberry pi).

Anyone know about lineageos tv? It looks cool, but there might be some issues I dont know about not using it yet.