Because I don’t understand. Really.

An “ad” for me is “buy Charm paper towels” or “install app you don’t have”.

“Continue watching Reacher Season 3” is not an ad.

For you it is?

So a “continue watching” or “new on amazon prime” is an AD now?

You can just move them off the top row and you get no “ads”. Only put stuff with no previews in there.

Wtf? Where? I have three and zero ads.

If I select a top row app, that application can “advertise” what’s new on the top half of the screen. That’s it.

Apple TV the device has no ads, zero, nada.

What ”launcher”? The TV app? You can just move it away. There is no launcher anywhere, every service along with AppleTV+ is just a separate application

Not at this scale. Remember that Apple is a hardware company first. They make money from hardware and app stores.

Google is the worlds largest ad company who dabble in hardware and services to increase their ad revenue.

What? There’s one icon that says “TV”. You can move it to the bottom and you won’t see any apple stuff beyond that.

Not a popular answer, but Apple TV is the best out of the box experience. Zero ads, massive longevity. Mine is like 7 years old and still running the latest tvOS.

If you have the cash and inclination, Nvidia Shield is the hackers choice. Zero hardware upgrades in years tho, but software aplenty.

Just don’t let your smart TV access the internet in any situation, there’s no need. It’s just a stupid display.

Yea, I have the VNC virtual docker hack running and it’s annoying. The weird UI is even worse because the virtual desktop doesn’t map properly and dialogs become full screen affairs etc.

I’m trying to use it as little as possible 😅

Need to look into your ebook flow.

I… dislike Calibre because of the “unique” UI setup and the fact that it’s next to impossible to self-host on a NAS.

But sadly it has every feature ever, which makes it essential and irreplaceable.

Now guide your parents through installing Jellyfin on their TV so they can connect to your instance.

That’s why people get Plex.

Basically the local models don’t (and can’t) contain the full knowledge of the universe.

BUT they can call tools pretty well and if you give the harness the capability to search Wikipedia for example, it becomes a lot smarter

Qwen3.5 and Gemma4 are the best ones for tool calling that don’t need massive amounts of memory

Nothing you can run with affordable hardware. The SOTA stuff requires hundreds of gigabytes of memory - and not RAM, GPU memory.

But you can try with stuff like gpt-oss or qwen coder

I do run Jellyfin too, it’s pretty handy at getting metadata for stuff locally so I have something outside of Plex’s internal databases.

And IIRC I have used Jellyfin in the past to watch some more esoteric stuff that Plex (and its official clients) couldn’t play.

But there’s no way in hell I’m opening it to the outside world.

I paid 79€ or something for Plex Lifetime well over a decade ago and it’s by far the best bang for buck I’ve ever got.

It’s also dead simple to share it with friends and acquaintances safely. I know how to manage VPN tunnels and all that shit. I’m not setting that up for my aunt who lives 4 hours away. We did manage to get Plex running on her TV over the phone though.

It’s literally a Raspberry pi 3B+ and a USB hard drive in a plastic storage box at my parents house 😅

A second offsite NAS (my old one) with the same capacity for the larger files

Backblaze B2 and a Hezner storage box for Really Important stuff.

My point was that the frequency of updates doesn’t correlate with quality at all

The huntarr project released a new docker image 3 times a day…