[patrickk]

This, this, this.

Just never, ever connect the TV to the internet. Connect up an Nvidia shield, or a mini-PC/raspberry pi configured with whatever apps you desire, hidden behind a pi-hole. Connect a steam deck if gaming/linux desktop usage is your thing. I only touch the TV remote to switch on the TV, and even that could be automatable with home assistant+CEC if that's of interest.

[dn3500]

I had a TV once, can't remember the brand, that refused to stream from my dlna server unless it could contact its own corporate servers over the internet first.

[FloatArtifact]

In theory, this seems great, but you won't be able to use the majority of streaming applications nor get the same quality out of those applications. Like Netflix, they purposely downgrade the streaming quality on desktop.

[patrickk]

The NVIDIA shield doesn’t suffer from those issues in my experience. It’s far superior when browsing menus for example versus on a smart tv as the hardware is still decent even for a relatively old product. I just hope NVIDIA continues to support it for a while more.