My Pi-hole logs are filled mostly with my LG TV and my Roku box. I get literally thousands of hits a day with them trying to phone home.

I have been using a linux minipc with debian+xfce for more than 15 years and no regrets. Yes having a keyboard with touchpad looked like a bit cumbersome at first, but then when al tvs went smart using an onscreen keyboard with a rf mouse is a nightmare.

What do you do about Netflix or other apps? They have reduced video quality without being on a certified device.

Get a firestick for those apps

They've sealed their own fate with such a poor decision.

This is why I've returned to the seven seas as well

I use a steam controller for controlling my media PC. Easy to type with and way more convenient than using a mouse. The only potential downside is needing steam running for keyboard capabilities but for me atleast that isn't a big deal.

The Sony TV I have a blaring LED when the microphone is active, and you need to pair it independently of the remote itself so these parts function.

Sometimes during software updates, this pairing is broken, and it never tells me that the pairing has been removed, and never forces me to pair the remote.

Which is a genuine shame, since LG's webos was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise monolothic android market for smart tvs. I have an older one ( never updated, never connected ), but.. it is just one of many devices ( during easter yesterday I watched in weird state of drunken realization that the gizmo under tv is a set of cameras embedded into some external speakers ). I am officially out of touch with the current zeitgeist. Like... I knew I was an outlier before, but I honestly did not think it was this crazy.

old webos you say? https://rootmy.tv/

I find a drop of superglue in the remote microphone is very helpful for retaining a basic level of privacy.

The more you learn about smart TVs the worse they get. They're not cheap because TV technology got cheaper, they give away the TVs because they sell all your data. They even content match external sources over HDMI.

My next TV will be a big monitor.

Content matching refers to matching refresh rate and resolution on the input source to the TV, not content identification.

there are TVs doing content recognition