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Own a Roku TV or streaming device? You're about to see a lot more ads on your home screen
(www.techradar.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
After various trial and error, not to mention irritation, I have determined that this is the way. It's what I did in the dark ages back in the day (with a Pentium 3 that had enough hardware acceleration to play DVD's!) and it's what I do once more. By hook or by crook, one way or another you're guaranteed to be able to retain complete control over a PC even if that ultimately means you have to install some flavor of Linux on the fucking thing.
You can get a perfectly capable media center PC for very little money if you don't need it to be able to run AAA games, which in my case I don't. Even the various nanocomputer boards like one of the beefier Raspberry Pi's or any of its myriad competitors can do the job these days, fit in a tiny enclosure, make no noise, and consume very little power.
Fuck all the Chromecasts, Fire sticks, Roku boxes, Apple TV's, and other sundry and bullshit devices of the world.
Nvidia SHIELD is still ok, because it's Android TV, and you can install custom launchers on Android. Therefore no ads on your home screen.
Granted, Nvidia is letting the SHIELD line twist in the wind, and the most recent model is from 2019, but it's not outmoded just yet. I'll still be using mine for a number of years.
The shield is great for the reasons you mention here. I use primal launcher and have a custom home screen experience without annoying ads.
The shield also outputs music over HDMI without resampling, which makes it awesome for my digital music listening, except the app support is lame.
Yeah unfortunately Android TV is neglected versus Roku and Firestick and so on, but most major apps are there, and you can sideload shit.