With the recent GN video I’d been wondering about turning an old mini PC from eBay into a little Linux TV box for streaming. I’d need access to Android apps (I guess through Waydroid).
After a brief look, it seems that the two options are some form of LibreElec system running Kodi or Arch running Plasma Big Screen. Any thoughts / advice? And if I went for Big Screen, does anyone know of any distros that ship with it or will I have to spin it up myself on Arch?
It does feel like such a subtle but firm line, that divides people who just want things to work and not demand anything in return, and people who see computing and media as inherently political and worth investing energy into, and critically choosing what to use and what to avoid. How we bridge that gap and wake people up is, in my mind, a bigger problem than any single use case.
People shouldn’t have to think about what companies are going to fuck them over or exploit them as they go about their daily lives. The modern world is far too complex. The government is supposed to protect the people from criminals and enemies, foreign and domestic, no matter what their organization or motives are.
As it stands, most of surveillance capitalism is criminal espionage — just a fascist/authoritarian invasion of privacy — and would be illegal if our political classes weren’t corrupt criminals themselves, pre-financed and pre-positioned by the oligarchs/plutocrats of the economic elite. The current clusterfuck is an illusion of “democracy” that is functionally-equivalent to capitalist dictatorship, where our governments actively collude with businesses to extract wealth from the population.
What I’m saying is that no appliance software should be surveilling you, period. None of the data brokers should exist. Most data collection and sharing that isn’t explicitly necessary to deliver a service should be illegal. People should be free to live in a world where the greatest concerns when buying a TV are the build quality, features, and UI. Not fucking covert malware or espionage. What is currently considered normal and acceptable is psychotic.
From where I’m standing, we don’t disagree about anything except for the power of the word “should”.