I also use Projectivity on my NVIDIA shield. No ads, no recommendations, just the apps I want. Everyday I'm glad I installed it.

Lol, just when I said I was going to take a break from tinkering, you tell us about this. Oh well! 😆

++Projectivy, it's top tier software. It's so clean by default, has lots of customization options, and no ads whatsoever. It's so good that I worry Google will try to take away the option to use a third party homescreen on Android TV.

I've been using Pi 4s with a lineage OS build that has the Jellyfin Android TV client on it and thats been a pretty sweet setup.

I just bought a Dell Optiplex 990 for 50 bucks on eBay. I lucked out in that the listing came with 8 GB of RAM. Just threw in a previous SSD, loaded Fedora Kinoite, and am currently playing with Podman/Docker Compose for an Arr stack. By next week, I should be able to move it from the corner where the router is, and then finally deliver on the promise that I made my girlfriend back in February, when I bought the HDMI projector and a speaker set.*

That said, I'm all for your idea, especially if it comes with an IR receiver, too.

If I get another Optiplex (that one for homelabbing), I'll look into COSA and Butane/Ignition files more seriously. That's a very solvable issue, after all.

* We had to move since then and I cannot find the front right speaker, for some reason. The company, whose name looks like the antagonist of FF8, doesn't seem to sell replacement speakers, either.

Raspberry Pis have CEC support. I've used it with OSMC (formerly either LibreElec or RaspBMC, one of those? It's Debian Kodi). It was much better without. So, if you turned the TV off with the TV's power button, the Pi would turn the TV back on.

The Pi has a 3.5mm audio jack. I have a set of desktop PC speakers that are hell and gone better than anything built into a television in the last 20 years. Not only is it not straightforward to get it to control the Pi's audio output level with the TV's remote via CEC, OSMC absolutely did not want to do this. Not only would that setting get revered to HDMI audio out, it would disable the analog out option, and you'd have to SSH in and change a config file to re-enable that option in the first place. That would happen either during updates or even just power cycles. I swear the phraseology of the line you'd have to put in that config file would change; the same line I'd put in there would still be in there and not working.

The thing with open source software is, it's always going to have the UX of a sinus infection, especially since the manufacturers of hardware gimp their devices to not work well outside of the walled garden.

MSI cubi fanless with KDE Neon autologin to Plasma Bigscreen with Vacuumtube, steam big screen mode, jellyfin... Remote controller is a Rii F8 mini which has a few programmable IR buttons for the old dumb TV.

The future is now...

Roku, Android TV (ONN), Apple TV, etc. all have Hoopla support. The app doesn't even have a way to browse titles, but if you know what you want to watch their app works.

Fortunately Roku is still not that bad. 3 rows of items to choose from, select and go.

It basically is a dump app launcher if you go into settings and make it one. Even more so once you use a network adblock to stop the single ad they display on the right.

Somebody once tried to sell a box that would cancel all your streaming services and only fire the account back up for a month at a time when you wanted to stream something. It was a phenomenal idea with a genuine problem worth solving, completely torpedoed by the fact of the box costing $400 up front and I think requiring its own subscription.

Dude just switched the launcher, should be doable on most Android TV devices.

Raspberry Pi can run Android TV, so you probably could run this launcher. Nvidia Shield is already compatible.

The others are closed systems I assume, I have no experience with Apple or Amazon devices.