Hey Folks!

Been looking at a lot of the TV options today and it feels as if all of them come with 'software' and an Ethernet connection.

Nothing wrong with that just trying to see what the opinion of the community has been. Particularly curious seeing Google literally has a line set up themselves.

Thanks!

I use either monitors or disconected tvs, and use kodi raspberry pi boxes for content, which access the internet though a vpn on their own specific router. I also have an Apple TV in the main room (best of a terrible bunch, if you ask me) for anything I or my family wish to subscribe to.

Smart TVs suck at security + TV manufacturers sell your data. You can buy a smart TV and make it "dumb" by never connecting it to the internet and running a Kodi device. I recently setup a raspberry pi with Kodi + wireguard VPN and its been great

Any TVs which come with Google TV as an OS have an option at first startup to be set up in "Basic Mode" which allows it to basically be used as an HDMI monitor. The main TVs which ship with Google TV are Sony's.

We have a mini PC dual booting Fedora and Windows plugged into a Sony TV. We only have Windows because some services such as Netflix purposely only allow 4k streaming on the Windows Store app. We also have a 4k Blu-ray DVD and CD player because we like to own physical media.

This setup has worked great for us. A good resource for this stuff is r/HTPC. As far as I know, we don't have any downsides to doing this as opposed to using the smart TV itself. Both the Windows and Linux have good support for surround sound (we have a 5.1 setup), and for HDR content we can use windows.