In principle, yes, and I believe a few small hobby projects have attempted to do this and support specific TVs. However, interest in developing a custom Smart TV platform tends to get siphoned away into a project where the output from your actual platform is displayed on the TV rather than running directly on it. Simply, it’s easier to develop and maintain support across different models.

Why would you develop a custom TV OS that runs on one TV when you could develop it for any mini PC and immediately support all TVs? You’d have to develop your OS to run on each specific TV model which will make it quite hard to reach a critical mass sufficient to attract attention from developers and users alike.

The juice isn’t really worth the squeeze. It’s not like TV vendors are publishing detailed hardware specs and drivers. Writing or even porting an OS is hard. Look at the state of the Android ROM scene, and that’s about as good as it gets when some vendors are actually attempting to open source their drivers. The difficulty is much higher and the interest lower due to the existence of a viable alternative.

With that said, motivated minds have done it anyway. You just need to have the right TV for it.

HIPAA.

Universe: whoops let me fix that.

Like the horror of this code is wrong but the program works.

Thank you very much for the clarification. I didn’t know that was a distinct feature.

Maybe I’m being stupid but a trivial way to ensure this is just don’t connect it to the Internet in any way. No SIM card. Cut it off from the Internet after setup, and only connect to a LAN with your chosen services all physically isolated from any internet machines.

The intended chair is a huge fan of data caps to increase profits, so I’ll give you one guess.

$1/mb is now the only plan in your area.

ISPs generally have few to zero competition, so I expect this will generally be awful in face of deregulation.

You’re mistaken. He is a king now.

Most EXTREME.

You’re using it wrong!

Serious question as a visitor to Berlin. Are there a large portion of people that do this on purpose for this express purpose? Is this actually a thing? I noticed quite a lot of graffiti.

It’s OK my local Walmart will force you to do your own checking out in the future anyway.

My area is so conservative they banned bans on single use plastic to own the libs.

It’s not even extra hassle to me because I hate how the cashiers were bagging items anyway. Problem solved. No waste. Exactly how you want it every time.

Is this really true? I read that it was only the control click shortcut that was disabled.

Tiny Core Linux is a minimal Linux kernel based operating system focusing on providing a base system using BusyBox and FLTK. It was developed by Robert Shingledecker, who was previously the lead developer of Damn Small Linux.

Ah, that explains a lot! Didn’t know about TCL.

Hm? Do you mean a link to builds that are this small? My midrange Intel i5-12600K (I’m a working man, doc…) L3 cache is 20,971,520 bytes. My Linux Mint (basically Ubuntu kernel) vmlinuz right now is only 14,952,840 bytes. Sure, that’s a compressed kernel image not uncompressed, but consider this is a generic kernel built to run most desktops applications very comfortably and with wide hardware support. It’s not too hard to imagine fitting an uncompressed kernel into the same amount of space. Does that help to show they’re roughly on the same order of magnitude?

Ten years old kernels could be 2 MB.

I’ve seen builds of the Linux kernel that comfortably fits in my on-die CPU caches.

So it would just be a picture of an empty sofa.

Not indexing at zero seems like a waste of a perfectly good integer.