Yeah, Chromecasts are much better than Fire TV’s, due to the more control you have over them and how easy it is change the launcher vs. Amazon actively preventing it. Basically same price and budget as well. Plus Google running a newer version of Android in general vs. Amazon’s, etc. Chromecasts are probably lesser of the two evils imo.
Pretty much unfortunately. The good thing is its trivially easy to change launchers on the NVIDIA Shield or Google TV devices, plus you can even go a step forward and debloat them entirely with ADB. Amazon’s really the only manufacturer I’d say that forces home screen ads with no choice around it, since they actively prevent changing launchers and such. But Apple is probably the only one out of the box with no advertising.
If you have the money, I’d go for an NVIDIA Shield, or maybe an Apple TV. Well worth the money.
Otherwise, for budget, you could get a Chromecast, which gives you more control over it and has generally less garbage than the Fire TVs do for instance, since you can easily change its launcher and debloat with ADB.
You can easily change launchers on the Shield and remove all of Google’s nonsense through ADB as well though, unlike Amazon who locks down the OS very tight. Plus like another commenter said, you can just flat out install LineageOS and you’re good.
Not Chromium, Extremely customizable and configurable, and add-on support on mobile, to name a few reasons.
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Yep, they’re horrible. I always disable internet on them, uninstall any apps I can, and generally do what I can to avoid using the built-in smart TV, but I shouldn’t have to do this, its unfortunate and sucks to deal with. They just take advantage of consumers who don’t know better, wish the TV market wasn’t like this. :/
This list has so many weird and obsolete recommendations, looks like its being refined and improved according to this, so until that’s finished, I’d take it with a heavy grain of salt.
Best way to fight against things like this is with your wallet. Stop buying and supporting games with Denuvo or any other similar DRM.
Basically, LMG were producing way too much content way too fast without proper testing of products and were making tons of mistakes, and wouldn’t take the proper measures to take accountability for or fix the mistakes they were making. An egregious example was a mouse they reviewed where they literally didn’t take the tape off the bottom of it. They also got a one of a kind prototype cooler from a very small start-up company, improperly tested it (used the wrong GPU that it wasn’t even made for), blasted the product and called it horrible because of it, then refused to properly retest it because it’d at most cost $500 (despite them being a $100 million dollar company), and to put the cherry on top, auctioned off the product despite the company explicitly requesting it back and LMG even agreeing to send it back.
Now LMG is also being accused of sexual harassment and being an overall extremely toxic and horrible work place by a former employee.
I’d strongly recommend just watching the Gamers Nexus video and reading the thread from the former employee because this reply doesn’t near do this shitshow justice and I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot details.
Gonna quote myself from an earlier comment I made:
On Windows, just use the built-in Windows Defender. On Linux, I recommend ClamAV + ClamTK. On Android, Hypatia.
If you think you have malware, this is a pretty good guide to remove it.
I’d also strongly recommend using and configuring a content blocker like uBlock Origin in your browser, as well as using a DNS level blocker like NextDNS.
If you have a multilayered setup like this, then I think you’re pretty good and it’ll be not impossible, but much harder to get malware or be infected. Just use common sense as always.
I generally avoid Cloudflare where possible personally because at the the end of the day, they’re a giant big tech company based in the US, with pretty much unprecedented control over the internet.
With that said, last time I looked into their privacy policy, I thought it was acceptable, but that’s been a while ago, so not entirely sure nowadays. Either way I’m not a huge fan.
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I love Jellyfin and mainly use it and recommend it where possible these days, but man, the download situation sucks. Hate having to download files without compressing them, especially since I keep my media lossless. Its the main reason I’ve still kept Plex running on my server. Also sometimes the clients can be wonky, I’ve found Jellyfin works best for me with Kodi as the player for most things, which is interesting. But overall I do like Jellyfin and support it and its mission, hopefully gets better in these aspects in time.
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I understand how you feel, let me know if you find anything. I’m more left leaning myself, but I’m also not a fan of echo chambers and it gets pretty tiring and annoying seeing the same stuff over and over again. At the end of the day, I just wanna see an open, fair, and balanced discussion. The Fediverse is undeniably very left leaning currently, which is surprising to me since you’d think the anti-censorship design on paper would appeal more to people on the right who are against big tech and censorship, but I guess not? It’s interesting.
Fedora easily. It has everything I want out of a Linux distro and more, its what I recommend to people for both beginners and more advanced users, because it just has so much to like about it. I’ve considered and have been tempted to go down the Arch route, but I just don’t think its worth it for me when Fedora is so damn good, and I can easily tweak or configure anything I dislike about it, that’s the beauty of Linux.
Thanks, I’ll check that out then.
Welcome!
How hard was it to set up? I’ve been considering making my own personal instance for a while now but haven’t fully properly looked into it
Last good version of Windows, RIP 🙏