Welcome to Lemmy, and thanks for sharing! The cause is worthwhile, but you’re being downvoted here because your post is off-topic.

Always try to post to a community suited to the topic of your thread, such as !ukraine@sopuli.xyz in this case.

The cause is worthwhile, but perhaps find a more on topic community for the post, such as !ukraine@sopuli.xyz.

Potential evidence being destroyed just by giving the Internet access to it.

Wine can be set up in a similar way, but Valve’s default setup is designed to for use with Steam first and foremost.

A bigger issue is that the Steam Deck touchpads don’t work without Steam being open. A more open approach would have been to write independent driver software for the touchpads.

Valve’s far and away better than Nintendo, but has still designed the Steam Deck to be heavily reliant upon Steam to function. The Steam Deck is priced in a way that anticipates increased consumer usage of Steam, but in isolation of Steam, it would be more usable as a Linux PC if it were more software-agnostic.

Valve’s better than Epic Games, but they still have every incentive to keep users in their ecosystem with DRM. To that end, the Steam Deck’s Proton compatibility layer and touchpad driver are integrated into Steam, rather than functioning independently of it.

Using the Steam Deck is possible without buying any games on Steam, but making Steam the core part of the distribution inherently encourages its usage.

Edit: I like the Steam Deck, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to point out the aspects of the platform designed to encourage the use of Steam.

eBay owned PayPal at one point, but both companies today are independent and separate from one another.

We might have to wait until their announcement on the 13th to know more, but if the launching of new merch and discussions of overseas development is anything to go by, they might not be canceling it, but rather replacing the entire development team with a new one overseas, all the while implementing microtransactions everywhere.

They’ll have lost most of the public’s goodwill in the process for doing so though.

It would seem that the owner sold it to a private equity group, which is predictably seeking to milk the game for profits.

Any remnant of Copilot left anywhere on the operating system is still a loss for the user and their privacy. Microsoft still wants user data, so they’re not going to be getting rid of Copilot any time soon.

He’s crazy, and therefore doing more harm than good in advocating for piracy.

Improving webapp functionality rather than stuffing more and more AI down our throats, for instance.

.org, .se, and .in were revoked as a result of the Spotify announcement, unfortunately. .li and .pm are left.

Welcome to the Threadiverse! 🎉

1.5 million websites that, whether obscure or not, deserve to be indexed no less than the many obscure GitHub pages that Microsoft is sure to index.

The Associated Press shouldn’t take their ‘glitch’ claims at face value.

Some things I’ve tried getting before (typically 2160p television episodes) were only readily available as DDL files (missing from easily accessible private trackers like TorrentLeech), for which Real-Debrid is useful.

Over 1.5 million Neocities websites; Geocities, however, is dead.

It’s good to know when Reddit moderators see the light and help transition their communities over before Reddit interferes. !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is another example of that.

Should you need it for later, here’s the first few steps after you have the Onn device (or an alternative Google TV device) in hand. The links included are guides for the steps.

For the VPN process (if you choose an Onn device), I remember having problems with the wireless hotspot method that led me to do the ethernet option instead, but either should work. If you choose to install LineageOS, I unfortunately don’t have experience doing that, but that would come before app installations.

If you are using an Onn 4K device, its remote should have a mappable star button that can only be configured while using the default launcher. I personally chose to map the TV’s input switch function to it, but this step should occur before setting Projectivy Launcher as the default.

Next, you would install the Downloader app via the Google Play Store. Not ideal to have to use the Google Play Store for any installation, but at least all subsequent apps can be installed via Downloader instead.

Using Downloader, you can now install and configure Projectivy Launcher. This also involves installing the Launcher Manager helper app to configure the default launcher, giving you the option to return to the default if need be. While you can try uninstalling all the bloatware that comes with the device, some of it might come back with updates (though presumedly not an issue if you install LineageOS). Should that occur, you can instead disable the apps in the Android settings or hide them from the Projectivy Launcher menu. The hiding apps feature is also useful for hiding apps such as Downloader and Launcher Manager after setup, as they’re not regularly needed. Ensure you enable the override home button setting to make the button send you to Projectivy Launcher instead.

Stremio is available on Google Play again for now, but you can alternatively install it via Downloader too. SmartTube is of course not available on the Google Play Store, but can be easily installed via Downloader too. It has many configuration options for its UI, as well as an in-app self-updating function.

Alternatively to Downloader, you can also install a file manager app and install APK files manually. Devices like the Onn 4K Pro let you expand the device’s storage with a USB drive to transfer files or load external media, though apps such as atvTools (Android/iOS) let you send files wirelessly to the device’s internal storage.

While only the Google Play Store can automatically update apps, an alternative is the APK Updater app, which scans several APK sources to let you manually update installed apps. There now also seems to be a third-party F-Droid client for Google TV.

As the Onn 4K Pro has several sponsored buttons that become useless without their intended apps, I tried using a button remapping app to map newly-installed apps in their place, but had mixed results in terms of buttons acting up. People seem to recommend tvQuickActionsPro though, which might work.

An issue regarding SmartTube is that if you use the voice command functionality of the remote to look up YouTube videos from the launcher (rather than within the app itself), Google TV will try to open them in the default YouTube app. Normally, a bridge app could be used to connect SmartTube to the YouTube API calls. Since YouTube comes preinstalled on the Onn 4K Pro (though presumedly wouldn’t if you use LineageOS?), this method must be used instead. If you don’t use that functionality though, it may be a moot point.

Unplugging and replugging them doesn’t trigger the location check, only if you perform a factory reset.

As long as the free VPN has a U.S. IP address, it should work. Proton VPN has the U.S. as an option on its free tier, for instance. To use it on the Onn 4K device during setup, you’d either need a router that sends all traffic through the VPN, or to tether the VPN from another device.

Since the Onn 4K Pro has an Ethernet port, I tethered the device to my Windows laptop to share its VPN signal (requires configuration of the Ethernet settings). An alternative for the non-Ethernet devices seems to be via a hotspot, either with Windows or rooted Android. Should rooting Android not be an option, this post claims it’s possible to do without rooting.