With it being virtually impossible not to buy a "smart" TV, giving people the option to have connected software that doesn't phone home is a great idea. I wish the average person was more aware of these types of options.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Hopefully this will work with Google TV too since it's essentially just an Android TV rebrand for Chromecast. Some of them have decent hardware though, but are held back by the all of the Google bloat. Even using apps that allow adb on Google TVs you can't fully remove it all without soft-bricking the TV.
I've tried setting Kodi up on a few TVs that I've fixed, then put them on a VLAN so they couldn't go online, but could still access my NAS. And even with some having hardware support for AV1, anything over 4-5Mbps or so would cause them to drop frames and lag out. The HEVC support was a little better and will usually do 10-20Mbps+ before running into issues, which is plenty for most YarTube content. So I did a little more digging and noticed that the CPU was sitting at a constant 30%+ usage just doing background bloatware bullshit. So if we had a better UI option, it would open up a lot of cheaper $200-300 4K Google TVs that can stream from a NAS or Jellyfin/Plex server without needing to transcode. Since they have hardware support for basically everything.
This is exciting! I have been wishing it would get some love lately.
I want it to be run as a desktop environment. Is that possible? I already have laptop connected to tv with hdmi. I just use it like a normal computer. But I don't have any applications that can work well with that setup with TV like UI.
What applications are you using?
I am just using Firefox to open web sites for most things. For games I open them directly. And I have kdeconnect to control it from my phone.
Ideally I'd love a launcher that just stays on there forever, with some virtual desktop options where I can open different apps. If it can support game controller to choose apps along side kdeconnect it'd be the best.
Theres usually at least some support for connecting game console controllers. That might be an option alongside kdeconnect for the games. I think ps4/xbox one and later both work out of the box over bluetooth. Not sure how it would work in firefox though.
Game controller works fine in the computer. It's the applications that need to support it. Problem is finding normal applications (not games) support it. I could map the controller to keyboard keys, but it'd be nice to have it work directly.