Good to hear. Having a raspberry and kodi focused base with an open Linux backend sounds good. Will try that later.

There is sendtokodi, which uses yt-dlp. I’m a bit surprised that there are no newpipe-extractor clients for Kodi, since there should be hooks for everything you’d need. Then again, I don’t know how well it works outside of Android.

Depends on how far you want to go. From what I’ve been able to tell, they pedel a lot of flashy metrics and still had a bunch of google calls. Some of which you can manually remove, same as LOS. I would avoid buying into their cloud and keeping an eye on things yourself, if you want to install it. I saw them rebrand a bunch of OSS tooling as their own products back then. Don’t know if things changed since then, but I don’t trust the marketing.

I’m on Tuxedo now, really nice so far. Thanks.

I’m currently on Tuta, because I can’t imagine Mail without a free tier. It’s run out of Germany(EU). Its 3€ a month for the normal tier, free takes away most features. Like Proton, you need to use their (OSS)-Client, for encryption reasons. It’s currently growing and I hope they don’t go crazy anytime soon.

I was looking at Posteo, but I don’t want my entire internet identity to be gone, if I ever can’t pay for it.

I’d be a good start, if content platforms had to apply the same guidelines to ads, as they do to content. It’s kinda telling that people on the platform need to not swear, while the ad below goes “You can’t last 5 seconds in this NFT gambling waifu gatcha collector aimed at teens.” or just offer money freud scams directly.

Honestly, I was avoiding Debian for the staleness, but it might be what I go for. I use ungoogled chromium, and all but the flatpak version seem to lag behind. I don’t like the packaged dependencies for each app, since there tend to be a lot of redundancies and bigger deltas. Though if you fully commit to flatpak, with Debian as a stable base, that might be good. The more I try to customize Mint, the more it fights me.

An advantage of Tuta and Proton is, that there is a basic free tier. Your Mail is a center-point of your online activity. Hoping it to never happen, if you ever can’t afford the (cheap) price, you won’t lose access to your mail. Which would suck, for all accounts linked to it.

From what I’ve seen, the argon does passive-cool alright too. With Flirc I’d need to keep the mini-HDMI-dongle and buy a separate IR dongle, that takes up a usb-slot and doesn’t have a low-power MCU. My Pi is currently in a no-name passive-case already. Unless I misunderstood you, I don’t see the advantage.

Yes, that’s what I meant by “widevine tax”, the certification is done by Google for a fee.

Yeah, it’s kinda telling, if you look at my prime subscription for example. I can either:

• Hook into the web-service with Kodi, breaking TOS and theoretically risking the account. While Google, missing their widevine tax, limits the quality.

• Pirate the same content without an account, at full 4K.

It’s truly a service problem.

I do have a Jellyfin server, this is mainly about being able to use the subscriptions I happen to already pay for. Decoding on the pi is actually quite decent with hvec and x264.

Like others said, banking needs licensing and licensing costs money. If you already have a bank account, you already trust one party. Ask them if they roll their own app-payment or are already partnered with a service. That way, you can avoid google/Apple and minimize spreading the trust to other parties. My bank cooperates with Fidesmo, for example. Fidesmo then sells wearables with nfc-pay.

I would absolutely buy a Pixel, if only they supported sd-cards. I get that Google is pushing cloud-storage. If I smash my phone on the sidewalk, I still want to have a local storage, I can take out and thus make live backups to. There are just some features Pixels lack and privacy shouldn’t lock you out of them.

As stated in OP, I have an S2 dish already. Agreed that it’s better than cable. But not everyone lives in a place they can set up a dish on. Rentals and such. My point was that I wanted to use the display without relying on some buggy vendor-locked OS.

From what I can see, this is still a Tizen based smart TV masquerading as a monitor, Apps and all.

When scaled to mass production, the SBCs become dirt cheap. Then they can subsidise with sponsored/preloaded content, ads and usage data.

I was eyeing Scepter, but I just saw that their stuff is made with exclusively US standards and EU power and broadcasting is different. Didn’t notice that would matter.

Seen them recommended in dumb-tv articles. Will check them out.

I might resort to this. It’s mainly just the e-waste potential that has me bothered. The OS will inevitable break after EOL, and the hardware becomes inoperable without the “hdmi-app”. The computer parts are usually dirt cheap and eventually break themselves even on minimal use.