I’ve had an old LG 47-inch smart TV that’s been sitting around collecting dust for years. It has a perfectly usable 1080p panel, but the smarts behind it have been obsolete for years. The last firmware update it received was in 2016, and its only accomplishment was to remove the Skype app. All modern streaming support has long disappeared, but I can’t justify throwing away an otherwise functional television.
So, I connected an old NUC6CAY Intel NUC, complete with a 1TB hard drive, and tried to build the smart TV LG stopped supporting long ago. I didn’t want another Kodi box because my local media library isn’t big enough to justify it. What I wanted was something closer to Android TV, but with a good amount of storage, a full-featured browser, and enough freedom to build my own apps.
The three obvious solutions failed spectacularly, but ordinary old Linux finally worked.