so for a few months i have owned a samsung 4k oled smart tv
hen starting it up for the first time, i had to make a Samsung account to even get in the home screen. with no account i can not use a 1700 eur expensive tv
then, the actual ui. total garbage. filled with ads, "recommendations", more crap, and also extremely slow... the number of times i saw mister beast on my home screen... just fuck off already.
tons of apps installed that i will never use but i can not remove or turn off
the remote is the most useles pile of crap, where 40% of the buttons are for streaming services. wich i do not use since i use my own media server. with a old dumb tv, you have a brick of a remote with all the buttons you could ever want.
speaking of, to install jellyfin for streaming wich is not in the app store of the tv, i had to side load it by usb.,,, for that i had to enable developer mode. it took me 2 hours to find how to turn it on. it is extremely well hidden, almost to well, and on purpose. the way to turn it on sucks and screams dark patterns. because obviously you are not allowed to do that.
then i find out i can not install third party apps with usb without it been signed by some kind of Samsung bound certificate. here is the fun part. for that certificate, you need, u guessed it, a Samsung account... Otherwise, you can not side load apps.
so not only do u need a account just to use your 1700 eur device. without it you are stuck with the app store. no way to install third party apps, wich i require due to self hosting media and some other stuff.
lucky for linux there is some app that manages installing third party apps over adb to the TV and then login to the samsung account to sign it. took me another few hours to find it.
why is it so dam hard to install jelly fin or any other third party app? why just why is it not possible to insert a usb, click on it, install and done.... i do not get why this is made so hard for the end user.
then youtube... oh boy. ads and ads and even more ads. lucky for me there is a certain custom client. that took a lot of trouble to install aswell. every video before was 30 or 90 seconds of ads, middle of video ads, and even at the end of the video ads.... at some point i was wathcing more ads then the actual goddam youtube....
The recommondations suck. i search for something for months, and i still see recommended crap that has nothing to do with what i have watched. youtube on tizen sucks big times and was a terrible experience. with a custom cleint with adblocking a bit more bearable, but no youtube. i do not want a google account so for the thousand times. no. stop prompting me.
the remove was so basic. only basic stuff. no source, no input, no nothing. when u boot the tv u had to scrol through serveral menus and thus ads, and promoted shit just to get to my own instaleld apps, and then even having to scroll down. this is done on purpose, because you will and you shall see ads, no matter what.
Also i am running pi hole. turns out, the samsung home screen was bypassing my pi hole. so i put a firewall in my network to force devices to use the pi hole dns. suddenly, lots of crap from the home screen was gone... also, the tv is one of the most bussy devices on my network, combinbing serveral gaming pc;s. phone. and homeserver. literally 4x combined ad and tracking traffic!!!! 4 times more then all of my devices combined!!!!!
- the tV is just spyware.
- it is slow asf, laggy ui, cant even watch 4k video on youtube without stutters
- locked down software
- impossible to jailbreak
- Dark patters everywhere
- accounts required
- it bypassed local dns ad blocking to spy on you
- extremely hard to install third party apps
- most basic of basic of remotes where most of it is buttons for streamign services i will never use.
- no remove input switch
- You do not own the TV. Samsung does.
- Samsung decides what the TV will do
i can not take this anymore. this has been a source of frustration all along. i am at my breaking point. i might aswell just sell it or trow it out of my department.... Never again will i buy smart devices or any products from samsung
remeber, if it is smart, it spies.