Lack of a built in file manager on any device is an excellent indicator of "how bad the manufacturer is trying to reduce your freedom."
Moreover, they correctly understand what the TV industry works so hard to obscure. It's computers all the way down. If you're gonna slap a computer on my screen, then let me use it as a general purpose computer. If, however, you insist on putting a computer on my screen that I hate, then make it easy for me to avoid it.
And of course, we know why they don't do this -- the low cost of the TV is subsidized by the data they sell to others gained by spying on you.
> They want "just a screen" precisely so that they can use whatever they want on it, including filemanagers if they wish.
Yep - and if the screen is "just a screen" (i.e. has no file manager or other media-interfacing functionality on it), there there will need to be some _other_ computer in the stack of "computers all the way down" to provide the media-interface. For me, Kodi does that job perfectly well, but it doesn't work well for everyone.
> the low cost of the TV is subsidized by the data they sell to others gained by spying on you.
Yes, this is an uncontroversial statement of a distasteful truth.
Maybe newer TVs (this one's 10 years old) have support for more codecs, but I'm not inclined to replace it when it otherwise continues to work well. I'll just drive it with a Raspberry Pi running Kodi and call it good.
You can also use apt to customize OSMC because it's based on Debian[1].
The maintainer, Sam Nazarko seems really helpful too.
[1] https://osmc.tv/wiki/general/installing-packages-via-apt/
One point to consider, though, is that most TVs don't have built-in file managers (or, indeed, NAS-connection capability) - for folks who prefer to watch their media on a big screen, you need some client that can a) connect to your storage location, and b) play it out over HDMI etc. For me, Kodi is the best-functioning of those options.
If you're content with watching on a laptop/PC screen (or if your PC has your TV as an AV-out), however, then you're golden and there's nothing that Kodi really does over-and-above to make it worthwhile.
EDIT: Ah, I see[1] you do indeed have a PC connected to your TV. In which case - yeah, there's no reason not to do what you're doing!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634830