I replaced the TV Box from my ISP as well as the Media Player I already had for local media with a cheap mini-PC running Lubuntu and Kodi and have seen only a handful of adverts on my TV in the last couple of months (which I might see only when I’m watching Live-TV).
(PS: Mind you, there is no way to avoid Product Placement in Movies and TV Series, so I have still probably seen quite a lot of “covert” advertising).
The whole thing is now under my control and hence I don’t have to endure that crap.
Granted, I’ve been a Techie for decades and have for a long time been very aware of how software with Internet access is an agent of the software maker serving their objectives, not of yours serving your interests and how anything you paid for held by somebody else isn’t yours until you take them into Court for it and win (so your “bought” movies held in somebody else’s system aren’t yours) so I never jumped into the Streaming bandwagon and instead kept my eyepatch handy and wooden leg polished, and when I got a TV some years ago - before the enshittification really took off - I very purposefully avoided “smart” ones like the plague.
Frankly even if you’re not technically adept just get a Mini-PC and install LibreElec on it (which is purposefully made for non-Technical users to just to use Kodi) and get used to using Kodi. If you’re into paying for it you can even subscribe to perfectly legit IPTV subscriptions with hundreds of Live-TV channels and it definitelly integrates with the paid streaming services if you can’t do without and don’t want to sail the high seas.
(I’m running Lubunto, a more generalistic lightweight Linux distro where I explicitly installed Kodi, rather than LibreElec, because I use it for more things than just watching stuff on my TV).
Any remote recommendations? I’ve been thinking about doing something similar.
I’ve got one of these and since in my PC Kodi is running on top pretty much all of the time, it works as well as a dedicated remote on a dedicated media box.
The upsides are that as I said it just works as one expects a remote and whilst it is wireless, it also has an infrared emitter and 5 programmable buttons for it, so I also use it to turn ON/OFF my TV and sound bar.
The downsides are that the little keyboard on the reverse side is a bit awkward to use, especially if you need to type uppercase characters, special characters or numbers and the air mouse is a bit too finicky to use comfortably, both of which are extras beyond the normal remote functionality, so it’s no problem unless you expect to replace a keyboard + mouse or remote login once in a while for Linux maintenance tasks. Also this specific remote won’t, for who knows what reason (bug? stupid design decision?), work if the remote is slightly tilted, which is a bit of a downside of this model and, of course, it can’t actually turn your PC ON because it’s wireless with a USB dongle and the PC won’t read USB it’s not ON (though maybe it can work if one uses hibernate and keyboard wake-up, since the remote just looks like a Keyboard+Mouse device for the PC, but I haven’t tried it and since I just have that PC on all the time because it’s also a home server, I don’t really care)
It’s my understanding that when you press a button in the remote these things just send down the pipe a key-press of a letter matching the function of the button (so for example the menu button is ‘m’) and those letters just so happen to be the Kodi shortcut keys for those functions (I reckon these things are standardized rather than “coincidence”).
You can see in the recommendations on that page various other similar models. I reckon that as long as you avoid the “Voice command” stuff (which is tightly tied with Google Android) and go for a wireless remote which looks like it has a many buttons as a normal remote would, you’ll be fine. Keep in mind that traditional IR remotes won’t work for controlling something like a PC because the PC has no built-in IR receiver or software for support such a remote (normal IR remotes are pretty custom with different codes for different makers and even devices, rather than standardized as this one seems to be) hence the need to use a wireless one with a USB dongle (theoretically Bluetooth should also work).
Honestly even a chromecast with Google tv and something like Stremio launched on boot would give you similar results for relatively cheap. No techiness needed, just some fiddling with settings.
How sure are you that the Google software and hardware you’re recommending won’t be enshittified at some point, especially in light of Google’s behaviour in recent years?
Because one of the core guidelines in this new setup of mine was exactly to avoid software/hardware stacks from profit-driven companies were the temptation to “make it nice now, enshittify for maximum $$$ once there’s a good installed base” is very much present, hence I went all the way to a fully open source solution with an as generic as possible mini-PC (the fully generic PC, a self-made desktop, would not have looked as good in my living room and use way more power, whilst the mini-PC looks like it belongs there and has a 15W TDP).
I mean, my first try at changing my home media setup was actually getting an Android Media Box (which is much cheaper than a mini-PC), but the mini-PC plus Linux gives me total control over the entire software stack and a lot more than an Android Media Box does over the hardware stack (I can actually add more storage, expand the memory and even change the wireless support) without having to jump through the hoops of rooting an Android to get rid of all the crap (and not just he crap from Google - for example I didn’t want Netflix on the fancy starting menu of the Android box and yet if I uninstalled it, the pretty picture for it would still be there using space whilst not actually working) which is not exactly non-techie friendly and might not even be possible (I do believe it is possible for the Chromecast, though).
Android is an inferior solution if you want to avoid enshittification and are not all that technically proeficient, though if you don’t care about being forced by the software on your own hardware into shit you don’t want (such as watching ads) it is the technically simplest option, but then again that scenario is just enduring the kind of abuse that the post is talking about, and my advice is not at all for people who are fine with ads and other “product promotions” (such as pre-installed software supporting services you have to pay for) shoved in front of them even in their own home and their own hardware.
Whilst I didn’t go for the fully integrated Linux+Kodu solution which is LibreElec and instead went for a self-made Lubuntu + Kodi solution because I have lots of experience with Linux and wanted to do more with that device than just “media box”, my expectation is that a single-purpose packaged solution like LibreElec on top of a mini-PC together with the kind of remote I mentioned above is the simplest “just works” option: so accessible to non-techies and without enshittification or a risk of future enshittification.
I’ve heard the nvidia shield is/was the gold standard for this purpose
it’s not, they started the enshitification process years ago, I threw mine away. In the fucking garbage if you can believe it because it started showing me ads.
Huuuuuge price difference though.
Though I guess the chromecast is being killed off so the difference doesn’t matter much anymore.
Fair. Added benefit tho; it’s not a Google product.
Downside: it’s Nvidia and they’ve gone off the deep end into AI bullshit. Arguably went off the deep end several years ago into Crypto bullshit.
I reset my Android TV to stock before the ads, block all updates, and just run Plex and Netflix when I choose.
Probably going to take it further in the future and just use a little android media stick and nuke the SmartTV is entirely because of how badly it lags.
Absolutely insane how badly AndroidTVs perform after a year or so of ownership. If I could revert the core software updates I would.
Also, wifi causes the entire TV to become a laggy unusable mess. Has to be plugged in over ethernet. Absolutely unbelievable.
Any 10 year old computer & LibreELEC.
My TVs are pre-smart TV and only 1080p and I have yet to feel that I was missing anything important.
Nah, my TV is not Internet connected. My router is as blocking. My dns is as blocking. My web browser and phone browser are web blocking. I use the YouTube website on my phone. If someone bypasses all that and pushes adds I just back out of that site.
lol not for me, i don’t connect it to the internet
There are/were already TVs that automatically connect to any public WiFi or even have their own SIM card.
Not mine. My TV’s my absolute digital bitch. It lets me do anything I want AND nothing, unlike Warren Buffet’s kids
Mine is a monitor and nothing more.
Literally came here to say that. HDMI is king!
DisplayPort is superior
Definitely, but unfortunately TV’s don’t usually have DP.
Any TV can have DP if you watch the right videos.
Bonus points for buying a smart TV to get the heavily discounted price and never connecting it to the internet.
Some of the brands have been reported to not allow you to do anything until it has an internet connection to do its “initial setup” (or some such excuse).
I hope I can find a list of which ones to avoid when I have to eventually replace my old dumb TV.
Then right back to the store it goes and labelled as defective so it gets tossed resulting in losses for all companies involved.
Of course, but that’s a lot more effort than it should be.
Even then, you’re still having to wait for its CPU to fuck around with the image and sound before it actually outputs it,
Dumb monitor > smart TV.
Point is, it’s near impossible to find a dumb tv with good specs. Like LG is producing no-smart version of LG C3 (best display ever so far), but it’s only sold to businesses.
Pi-hole, nvidia shield, custom launcher = less ads for the whole family
Which custom launcher are you using?
Flauncher here, and its great
How did you set it as the launcher? Adb?
Wasn’t even needed. Just downloaded the app with another downloaded app and then installed it. Then it props you what launcher you want. Plenty of videos on yt about this.
Do you know of a good tutorial on how to do all that? I’m planning on buying a new TV towards the end of this year and want to have the pi-hole, etc working first
Pi-hole is super easy. Literally just install it, and set your dhcp on your router to push out that IP as your dns server. Configure pi-hole to use an upstream dns server.
There’s a bunch of launchers out there. I did mine a whole back and used Wolf launcher, but later found out it was a “hacked” version of some other paid launcher. I used launcher manager to “enable” it on boot. Right out of the box, it has all apps and no ads. I suspect any launcher you go with will be similar.
Average users will not have the knowledge or patience for work arounds.
Imo, the larger problem seems to be the majority of users appear to be fine with ads and data collection just to watch a movie or series.
Imo, the larger problem seems to be
the majority of users appear to be fine with ads and data collectiona lax and ineffective regulation.“Voting with your wallets” is a false premise dreamed up by corporate to avoid govt regulation and has not and will never be a real thing that works in this world of monopoly and lack of option.
I think the best motive now is to stop paying altogether.
You can either vote with your wallet or do nothing…
Working people have no way to lobby government, shortage of a revolution, real people make decisions for benefit of other real people.
NPCs are just here to enrich them both.
You can either vote with your wallet or do nothing
I don’t want to fight here, we agree. In fact i bet we agree on a lot. But VWYW is, i can not stress this enough, not a thing. If it ever was in our lifetimes, it ain’t now. Its time the phrase was dropped outta everyone’s mouth.
You can purchase something that thru your effort does not do most of the awful things you are trying to avoid, that’s being a smart customer. It’s not like I’m dismissing the entire idea behind VWYW, just that it is simply that now, it’s an idea that doesn’t work with the facts on the ground.
The power of our “wallet ballots” gets lower when Monopoly power gets higher. Monopoly power is very high. VWYW power is in this world, in this moment, not a thing.
My point, is a simple but strident one. VWYW is not voting! It just isn’t.
It has absolutely no effect on the world around us. Puts no pressure on companies. Is not a thing except in our heads. It is time to let go of the idea.
And yeah…working people like you and me have no power period. “Voting with your wallet” is now simply a power fantasy pushed by capitalists to keep regulations at bay and held by the powerless clinging to an illusion of agency.
I don’t agree but you can either vote with your wallet or mindlessly consume.
One is better than the other but yeah 80% of spending is not really discretionary… Gonna need to get a rental, gonna need healthcare, transports education etc
But you can stop drinking soda for example… It ain’t much but it is something.
People don’t have to pay subscriptions either…
I … think i understand what you’re saying. You don’t agree with my definition of VWYW? I don’t wanna assume, but i think maybe you define it as reckless vs thoughtful spending?
Mine has to do with the effectiveness of our purchases in driving market trends. They do not.
You don’t have to buy a subscription to Netflix, but deciding not to isn’t changing anything for anyone (besides saving you 15 bux).
After nearly three years of price increases, signs that buyers have had enough are starting to mount. On Thursday, the food and beverage giant PepsiCo reported a 0.5 percent decline in revenues in the second quarter in its Frito-Lay snack business from year-ago levels, a result of a 4 percent drop in volumes in the category.
I think maybe we voted with our wallets against $6 chips but you could probably convince me otherwise in a paragraph :)
Well sir I’m always down for a nice discussion, you had me at hello. But youre in trouble if you only wanted a paragraph 🤣
Your link is great evidence to your point. It absolutely does reinforce the idea, with evidence that voting with your wallet does indeed affect change. I should say also my point isnt VWYW doesn’t ever work but that it has very little power.
I’d like to suggest that same article also helps mine, at least some.
Point being it shows VWYW (at the consumer level) didn’t have the power to stop the inflation of chips in the first place. Leaving aside the illusion of choice, the current system has taken the power of VWYW out of our hands almost completely.
The fact that PepsiCo even has that kind of market power is beyond question at this point right?
I’m not saying anything controversial if i take it further, that supply chains between our bag of chips and Pepsico, (distributors, grocery stores etc) are also consolidated, yeah?
At each step of the process, market consolidation reduced the ability of the companies within that chain to VWTW, and they pass the costs on down to the next link who also has no ability to VWTW. At the end of this chain we sit with our wallets, but the power has been diminished before we got to open them. Just like the lesser evil, VWTW becomes a choice of voting between ALL chips that cost more across the board or no chips at all.
That’s what i mean when i say VWYW in this system, at this time, is meaningless.
It only works in competition which we don’t have for the most part.
Instead we have the illusion of choice through multiple brand product names. There’s a couple choices, sure, but few enough to function as an effective monopoly.
They’re not “fine with ads and data collection” so much as they don’t care and can’t be bothered to look for a better way.
It’s just apathy and a bit of lazy inertia.
they don’t care and can’t be bothered to look for a better way.
This implies they are fine with it by tacit agreement.
No, it implies that they don’t understand that there is an option.
Your average user would also never be on lemmy to see this, at least for now.
Yeah that’s well put. All this advocacy for adblockers and not accepting the awful state of things fall on deaf ears, most people don’t care, they accept the state of things as it is, and technology as magic.
People deserve better and should expect/demand better.
Oh man, I’d hate to be the dude twiddling his thumbs on Ad 2 of 8 on Twitch.
“Dum de dum dum, wonder what the streamer is currently up to. Oh well, another 45 seconds to go. Dum de dum dum”
and i bet if most users would not put up with that, they would remove hdmi ports.
Server to host media. Super easy to set up and can run on a Windows client. Don’t even need an independent server to run it on. https://jellyfin.org/
https://kodi.tv/ (or https://libreelec.tv/ for an OS that boots to just Kodi)
Application to watch through Kodi https://github.com/jellyfin/jellycon
Client to run Kodi on: MeLE PCG02 Mini PC Stick https://a.co/d/1EGnekO
If you didn’t want to install LibreELEC to the PC and just want to keep Windows, you could run Kodi in Kiosk mode and it would boot directly to it just like LibreELEC.
I have not watched normal TV in years, let alone an ad on my TV. I spoke to my neighbors one day and figured out they were paying ~$60 a month for all their streaming services, and they’re STILL getting ads…
Stuff like this is unacceptable, and I refuse to partake in the lunacy and delusion that is modern television.
Also Plex as an alternative to Jellyfin with a way better UI and better app support
And also a good degree of bugs and enshittification
Wait plex or jellyfin? Both?
Since he mentions enshittification, I assume he means Plex.
However I am pretty sure both will have some bugs. I use jellyfin, so I can only speak about that. But one annoyance is that the androidTV app sometimes doesn’t have the best subtitle support. However it allows you to open movies in external players, which is a workaround.
Plex. Its been getting shittier for years.
Meanwhile JF has been improving in leaps and bounds.
I bought a lifetime plex pass once and have no issues since. HW encoding works out of the box, the scanners do their job and I can use their apps on every platform. I had to disable the Plex offered free movies once, the horror. Don’t act like Plex is some Google level shit of annoyance or ‘enshittification’.
Jellyfin on the other hand has atrocious UI that basically screams the absence of any sort of UI designer into your face, the HW encoding is a mess to set up and the apps are a jungle of different 3rd party apps…
Don’t act like Plex is some Google level shit of annoyance or ‘enshittification’.
Close enough for me.
The UI has always been pretty terrible to navigate but when they started trying to push all their streaming services I jumped ship. I don’t respect companies that don’t respect their customers. Jellyfin is better and is constantly improving where Plex is doing the opposite and wants to charge you for the privilege.
What streaming services is plex pushing? They offer integration for other services you subscribed to like Netflix or Disney and they also offer free, ad based services that you can permanently hide with one button. And the UI? Jellyfin is so convoluted, especially the settings.
You answered that yourself.
Question:
What streaming services is plex pushing?
Answer:
They offer integration for other services you subscribed to like Netflix or Disney and they also offer free, ad based services
Honestly thought it was just one service, not services, didn’t know it was that bad. Yikes! Commercialisation strikes again.
Plus, there’s the “Plex pass” as you mentioned. I’m sorry but I’m not buying some bullshit battlepass just to watch movies lol.
Convoluted
How are Jellyfin settings convoluted in the slightest? How is the UI convoluted? You keep saying it, but you can’t give a single example so far. Can you mention at least one?
As for the settings they’re all neatly split by categories and pretty straightforward, not that you have to use the settings much if at all tbh. Outside of “scan library” I don’t think I’ve been in the settings once after setting up the automatic subtitles download plugin.
Jellyfin is a great example of how FOSSware just works, and doesn’t stop working like the competing capitalist enshittificationware when it decides to rake it in.
I never said Plex is google-level enshittification, don’t project words in my mouth. What is a fact though is that it is undergoing enshittification and that it’s a buggy mess and video transcoding might work for you, but it’s a well known source of pain for others. It could be better on Jellyfin too, but nowhere near as difficult to set up, even on weird/unsupported systems.
UI screams no designer
Idk what you’re on about, not even LTT Linus pointed out any issues with the UI and he is no Linux CLI wizard.
If anything it’s far simpler to use than Plex because it doesn’t have the dark pattern bullshit into it.
You load the app, you hit movies or TV shows, hit your favourite movie or TV show and play. It’s not complicated at all, no need to click past the various upsells and no need to buy battle passes just to watch a film.
The only thing this supposed absence of a “UI designer” seems to have brought is the absence of upsells and enshittification/dark patterns.
The number of people suggesting this shit as a replacement for streaming services is way too damn high.
The monetary cost of the hardware is insane if you want to have any sort of hardware to store your data. But the time investment to get something like this running is 10x more. And at the end of the day it’s all 100% illegal and liable to get you in tons of trouble.
I pity the poor fool who sets up their smart TV instead of just grabbing an HDMI cable and plugging in their computer.
Ive been pretty happy so far with roku and blocking stuff with pihole, but every day I am more and more tempted to build a media pc…
This is the way to go. I tried pihole using Samsung smart features, but if you block so the telemetry eventually your apps stop working and you can’t get them working again without doing a factory reset with blocking down. It’s prohibitively a pain in the ass, taking hours every time YouTube stops working.
Never had any issues with Roku on pihole.
Depends on your blocklist. It would freak out every so often on me when I was preventing it from bypassing my DNS with its hard coded ones until I added in a forced redirect instead.
I believe one reason maybe that the software is so garbage it can’t handle not being able to submit all its logging information when otherwise the system thinks it’s online.
This is the case with Rokus as well. If you also redirect or block the hard coded DNS (Google) from bypassing your local DNS it starts to get extremely sluggish over time… presumably from background processes repeatedly resending requests out.
That makes perfect sense and explains why you can’t fix it just by bypassing blocking temporarily and reinstalling the app.
Currently trying that for the same reasons you are tempted. Roku was passable and even a good choice years ago and it’s on a precipitous race to the bottom now.
Problem for me currently is finding a non windows solution that is navigable from a controller or remote is … tough. Steam, emulation station, Kodi all have reasonable interfaces but there seems to be a gap in a unified launcher solution (as well as a decent ‘app’ for accessing YouTube.) I really don’t want to spin up a single VM for each activity when they all in theory should play nice together.
Exactly what I’ve been looking for too, and have come up wanting. I got excited recently about finding KDE Plasma Big Screen, but then it falls at the last hurdle on the app selection.
That gave me abandoned vibes when I looked into it. Maybe they just didn’t update anything on their site but I struggled to find any recent info or reviews on it. A shame honestly. I loved the idea.
My solution to this problem is Jellyfin, fed by usenet-backed sonarr/radar and Tubesync to pull in YouTube channel subscriptions. Those are added to a Jellyfin library which is accessible right next to movies and tv shows.
This is all through the Jellyfin app on a 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro. It’s a perfect couch-friendly setup. For just regular YouTube browsing, SmartTube can be installed on the Shield and on your phone. You can then cast to the SmartTube app on the Shield instead of to the YouTube app.
It seems we have similar backend setups 🏴☠️
I’ll need to dig into an android solution a bit - smarttube seems pretty nice but has no Linux version unfortunately.
That is beyond the capabilities of normies.
My wife would agree with this:
And I’ve got Plex running on an always on NAS.
This is the way
Lmao that greentext was literally me before I finally set up arrstack. One of the best investments of my time, it has definitely paid off over many years of just having things automatically download.
My Arr’s are unreliable. The trackers they search keep becoming unavailable for some reason. Flaresolver doesn’t seem to work with my VPN setup. Sometimes the file it finds to download turns out to be 54GB for a 1080p movie and I can’t figure out what the hell is going on there either. I haven’t got the time to look into Usenet any time soon. If I try to deploy something and it doesn’t work 100% right off the bat then the “wife acceptance factor” drops to zero, so I’ve got to be damn certain before I start tinkering.
This comes off the back of a device on my network causing router issues and making Plex unreliable for a couple of weeks. By the time I diagnosed and fixed the issue, the damage was done and wife acceptance factor was lost.
My gf loves stremio + torrentio + real debrid I set up for her
It does go down occasionally and she is more techy and patient than most but give it a try if you havent.
Its dead simple compared to what you’re doing now and good to have in your back pocket even if you want to maintain a local library. Having an issue? NP just open stremio and everyone’s happy
Man that sucks. I must have gotten lucky or something with my setup. I also have trackers go unavailable all the time but I enabled 8 different ones and usually multiple will have the same torrent so it usually has no problem finding something even if 1 or 2 are down. I also don’t VPN tracker searches, just my BitTorrent client so flaresolverr seems to work fine for me (I only have it enabled for 2 of my trackers since most of the ones I use don’t seem to require it).
If you end up trying it out again I would look into the quality settings and make sure you’re not using the remux quality profile (edit: apparently the default 1080p quality profile has the 1080 remux quality enabled so this might have been the problem). By default most of the quality profiles seem to limit at 100MB/min, so a 2 hr movie shouldn’t allow anything over like 12GB. Whenever I tweak quality or custom formats I refer to trash guides which has a lot of battle-tested rules you can copy. I have my main quality profile set to only download qualities between hdtv720 and br1080 (which is just below remux) with custom formats copied from trash guides set to prefer hevc with surround sound since I have 5.1.
Thanks. Really helps to know where to start looking when I get time over the weekend.
You may also want to look into Usenet instead of torrents when you’re researching. Sonarr/Radarr/Readarr etc all work (in my opinion) better with Usenet.
You’ll need to pay some, but the reliability is amazing, which is extremely helpful for the partner acceptance factor. I pay for two providers (newsdemon is primary and eweka is a backup) and two indexers (drunkenslug and nzbfinder), and everything has been rock solid reliable for years. Download speeds are also MUCH faster than torrents.
Combine this setup with overseerr (or jellyseerr) so your partner can find their own things to download and you might be able to get them back on board.
Plus, no flaresolverr required!
It seems like way more stuff than I want though
I mean yeah there’s a lot of stuff it does, but you can pick and choose what you want to use it for so it depends on what you would find useful - you don’t have to use the full automation. I started just by using it as a read-only way to see what movies I had and in what qualities and keep things organized. You can use it as a manual interface to do one-off downloads - basically just as an interface to search 5 torrent sites in 1 place where you are still picking exactly what you want it to download. You can use it only to rename files to a consistent format. So there are a lot of ways to use the various features of sonarr/radarr besides automatic downloads. You’re not forced to go all-in and out of the box it doesn’t start automatically downloading until you enable that.
That was definitely my misconception
I’m glad to clear it up! It’s a super powerful tool, and I still occasionally skip the automation and just use it for manual searches since it reduces that process to a single click to search all configured torrent sites and a single click to download and have the rest automatically handled.
Before when I was visiting friends and wanted to quickly add something to plex, I used to need remote access to my torrent client and separate remote access to my NAS filesystem to move/rename files when downloads finish which was a really manual process. Now all I need is the reverse-proxied sonarr/radarr UI since it handles moving/copying/renaming on download completion - and while the UI isn’t mobile-first, it’s very usable and feels less error-prone than moving/renaming files remotely using a file explorer app.
That is my preference, but my wife says she prefers only one step (turning on and using the TV) over multiple (turning on the TV, turning on the secondary system and using multiple controllers) so we go with the simpler setup per her request.
I did put my TVs on a Wi-Fi network separate from my main one so, while they do show ads as much as my pihole allows, at least they’re theoretically only spying on each other.
With HDMI-CEC you can achieve what your wife wants. I have one remote to turn on my Nvidia Shield (with Plex, Jellyfin, Netflix, etc), and that same remote also controls all TV functions.
Yeh, if I ever see my TV’s OS I’m like “fuck off! HDMI4!”
Ew.
GO AWAY!! BAITIN’!
I unironically wanna watch “ouch! my balls”, that looks like quality programming i could get behind
Isn’t that basically what Jackass was?
imho adb works wonders debloating many smartTVs. mine shows zero ads outside of commercial tv breaks. not even suggestions for amazon shows or anything in the dashboard. smarttube,kodi etc are just great!
You’ve gotta realise the average joe doesn’t know how to do any of that stuff though. Even trying to explain it to most people is too much. The frustration I find is, most people don’t actually want to learn, and they’d rather stay ignorant, and basically take pride in it.
