I forgot the Sidewalk is a thing. While that tech does kind of do what OP was saying, Sidewalk is limited to only Amazon Sidewalk compatible devices, like the echo line and ring. Just at a quick glance, there are no smart TVs that can connect to that network.

That said, it is an opt out service, which it awful. No smart TVs will connect, but I’d recommend disabling for anyone that uses Amazon devices.

Yea, this paragraph feels like fear mongering. I’m not saying OP didn’t see that somewhere, but from a tech standpoint, the TV still has to authenticate with any device it’s trying to piggy back off the wifi for. Perhaps if there were any open network in range it could theoretically happen, but I’m guessing that it’s not.

I do remember reading that some smart TV was able to use the speakers as a mic to record in room audio and pass that out if connected. It may have been a theoretical thing but it might have been a zero day I read about. It’s been some years now.

There are the obvious options that can’t work due to the general mode anti cheat software, but over the past 1.5 years, I’ve only had a couple of steam games where I had to tweak something because it didn’t work out the gate. Every major title I’ve played worked first try.

I tried Linux a couple times over the bast 20+ years and it was still too raw for me. Now, it just works for me. I’m by no means a Linux guru but I am a computer smart guy. I setup a laptop with Mint for my brother who knows the bare minimum about computers, and he’s had no issues using it. The progress made over the past decade has been wildly positive.

This makes Linux desktop a viable option for millions of users where it wasn’t before. It’s absolutely a battle between Linux and Windows.

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