*Deep inhale*
Soooo, my current tv is on the fritz. I bought it off a friend and he mentioned that he had taken it in for a repair; I wasn't worried because I knew I could get my money back if there was an issue.
That was 25 years ago. This thing has been a fricken' tank, day in day out. Current problem is a thick black line at the bottom of the screen. Online searches reveal it's probably a loose cable issue, so I'll probably set it aside for a future project.
I bought a new one (Hisense 58") at Costco for $399 plus $35 for the extended warranty (6 years total). Now it's not as good as a Samsung, but the extra warranty covers my ass and for $30 more I get an extra 8" over the Samsung, and who doesn't appreciate an extra few inches (amIrite?).
I remember our first tv as a kid; a 12" black and white!
Get it home and eventually wrestle this 30lb. behemoth out of the box. Scared shitless of even TOUCHING the screen due to all of the warnings about voiding the warranty.
I turn it on and spend about 10 minutes figuring out how to get out of the home screen (wtf?) with the remote. I find the settings and set up the HDMI ports, plug it into my laptop and navigate over to YouTube. Well, picture quality is pretty damn good, but the video stutters.
Hmmm, that's not good. Pretty sure that's going to interfere with my pornhub visits as well. So after a bit of digging around in the settings of the tv and my laptop I find that the tv's native settings are 60 Hz and the output on my comp is 30. No way to change it in the display settings with my current Linux distro (Zorin OS). But hey! There's a work around! Sweet! Requires d/l a few files and tweaking things using "terminal".
I begin digging into the details a bit more and, even though I can do this it'll only be good for a couple of years as the updates to Zorin will eventually over ride them. Hmmm, not good. Further searches reveal that Linux Mint Cinnamon should work and the hardware specs of my comp are a bit overkill so it'll probably run like butter. Nice!
I pop over to Linux, d/l the most recent version (took about 20 min) and begin the verification process, comparing the hashes and security keys (with MORE d/led files!) . That took about an hour and a bit! Seems that spelling is pretty damn important in "terminal" (who knew).
Finally! A verified, secure iso of Mint Cinnamon!
Then over to "disks" to create bootable USB so I can run it off of the stick to see how it all works.
At this point, I need a break.
The whole process has taken at least 8 hours to date.
WTF happened to plug and play?
Although I must admit, all this mucking around in terminal and figuring this all out keeps this old brain pretty plastic ('cause we're all full of micro plastics at this point).
So, yeah. I bought a tv.
How's your weekend been so far?