Comment by maples37

I recently bought a Samsung television, which came with a bunch of the smart nonsense. During the whole setup process I was thinking "I have made a mistake, I need to return this ASAP" but forced myself to continue clicking "no" through the setup screens.

After about 5 minutes of setting up (never once connected to Internet), it's pretty much exactly what I wanted: a display for broadcast TV and for HDMI inputs. A pretty good one, too. The only "tricky" part was getting it to remember the last channel/input at power-on instead of going to it's "home" screen, but that was just a setting in a menu somewhere, not particularly hard to find (though I'm the kind of person that does a depth-first-search through the entire menu tree just to see what all is there).

I think the key is never letting it get a taste of internet. No internet, no ads :) The internet-related things I do want to watch (like youtube, etc) are easily accomplished through the Linux PC I have connected.