Do you have a smart TV? What brand is it? How do you like it?
I have a Hisense TV that runs on some weird thing called Vidaa. It doesn’t seem to have an app store but international youtube videos show that it does. So it has a bunch of pre-loaded stuff that is useless. The work around I’ve found is to use the cast feature from my phone.
We have an LG Smart TV no idea what model, netflix, and so on works brilliantly on it, especially since we dont have dstv anymore. Casting to the pc from the laptop also works very well.
Same as yours - Hisense with Vidaa. It works fine but suffers from the same stuff as you - bunch of preloaded apps for the Asian and Indian markets that Hisense assumes we Africans must want to watch as well. 
Never actually figured out how to use casting to it though - will have to try soon.
Have an Android TV Box attached to the other older “Not Smart” TV that works quite well. Was on special when we got it - cost the same as one month of DSTv Premium subscription.
As a family we haven’t watched TV in years, we have one but it gathers dust. We either watch on our devices/laptops or as a family on my PC.
We’ve got a good ol’ Samsung so all the standard apps are available. It also has the Steam link app for casting gameplay onto the TV which is pretty cool.
We’ve got an LG too, unsure of model right now but they seem to have their own proprietary store and apps. That being said, it still has all the apps I would expect it to; Disney+, Netflix, DStv, YouTube, YouTube Kids, etc.
Does everyone want smart TV’s, that eventually aren’t updated, and get progressively slower over time, or buggier software? I have a Sony Bravia from 2011. Use a chromecast, to make it smarter than what it is.
So you reckon its better to have a normal tv and instead have a box to make the tv smart?
I prefer that yes. Some old Samsung’s and LG’s just got worse and worse, that family have. Now they’re all using chromecast, except for one of them using a android tv box of some sort, which seem to be faster, more current.
I’ve got an LG that started off as a smart TV, before eventually turning into a total moron. The TV can’t connect to the internet anymore which renders the apps on it useless, so I had to get a little box that I use for Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, etc. So far the little box is working fine.
I got a smart tv because of other features it had, like 3 HDMI ports, good colour and contrast, etc… I’d have gotten a non-smart TV if I had found a decent enough on.
I have never hooked it up to a network, ever.
Sure, they patched stuff, but it goes to show… Companies will mine whatever data they can for as long as they can until someone complains.
They even scanned for local shares and sent all the filenames it found unencrypted over the internet.
We are actually planning on doing that as well, so that we can get things like plex to work properly on the TV.
This reminds me, i wanted to create a honeypot, to check for dodgyness
Is it even possible to buy a TV that is not smart nowadays?
The only reason I have a smart TV is because it’s bloody difficult to buy a 4K TV without it being a smart TV. I’ve never used a single one of the apps though, we have an Android TV box connected and it works brilliantly so no need to use any of the other apps.
Best Non-Smart TV 2022 - Complete Buying Guide & Review - Flatscreen 
Looks like Spectre and Sony still make non-smart TV’s.
Yeah, as @DieGrootHammer pointed out, I recently bought a 4K TV and through all the regular channels (see what I did there 
) I couldn’t find one that wasn’t smart.
Out of interest sake I checked the app store for this Hisense TV. Man it’s a sad state of apps. They don’t have YouTube Kids, F1TV Pro or Showmax, so I’m just going to ignore the “smart” features it has.
I have a Samsung Smart TV. I only bought a smart TV as you cannot buy a dumb panel anymore. I never use it as anything other than a display for my other smart devices, like my Nvidia Shield and PS4.
So interesting development on this. Last weekend the TV degraded to such a point that the TV remote wasn’t even working anymore. The TV was already a dumb panel in the sense that it doesn’t connect to the internet anymore, none of the apps were working, it was slow, mouse pointer would not move smooth and then finally with the remote stopped working completely, I couldn’t even switch between HDMI inputs.
So after replacing the remote batteries (and that not solving anything), I went onto Google to find out how to resync the remote with the TV and followed the instructions. After getting the remote to work properly again, then everything else started working including the wifi?!?! Before the TV wouldn’t even pick up the internet even when connected to a LAN cable.
So for anyone who has a LG smart tv that has degraded into an idiot over time… Try resyncing the remote and potentially witness 10-fold IQ improvement for the old bastard. My TV has been working flawlessly all week.