What I don't get about smart TVs is why you can't use it with your phone. That's one of Kodi's best features. You can just type using your phone keyboard. Typing with a TV remote is a fucking NIGHTMARE.
Lemmy is not storing anything for no reason tho, there's no point in that without advertising. The only data they could hand over would be public anyway.
I think Piped just feels slower because of the web page, I've noticed that everything is a lot snappier when using LibreTube, especially playing videos. On LibreTube, when I click on a video, it instantly starts playing while I have to wait several seconds on the web page for it to start playing.
It started getting popular years ago and that's when me an my friends switched to it too (back when I didn't know shit about privacy). You gotta keep in mind the alternatives back then were Skype, which was meant for 1 to 1 calls, had shit audio quality and issues all the time and TeamSpeak, which was complicated because you needed a server (we were kids, we only knew what a server was from Minecraft) and had a text chat that was only a small part of the bottom of the window that was full of connected and disconnected messages, so I actually didn't even know you could write in that. TeamSpeak's interface also isn't exactly good-looking or very intuitive. Then came Discord, you could create a server for you and your friends for free, you saw who of your friends was online and playing what, you could see when someone was in a voice channel and could just join, you had multiple text chats where you could easily send a link or memes while playing and you could easily share your screen with the others. It was a major improvement over the other two. I know that it sucks from a privacy standpoint but there's good reasons why people started using it.
The applications just run in the background the whole time. KDE was working on implementing UnifiedPush in Plasma but I don't know if it's already implemented or still in the works.
But the hydrogen also has to be transported, which produces CO2, you need containers for that that also produce CO2 when getting manufactured. I'm not saying it's more than with a battery but it could be. We'd need actual numbers to really know tho.
If every app on your phone was constantly running and asking the server for new messages, it would drain a lot of battery. That's why phones instead use a single app that asks a notification server if any new notifications are there. The way it works is if you e.g. get a WhatsApp message, the WhatsApp server tells the notification server that you have a new message, then when the notification app asks that server for new messages, the server will tell it that there's a new WhatsApp notification. Then the notification app wakes up WhatsApp and tells it there's a new notification, then WhatsApp checks for new messages and shows you the notification.
Most apps use Apple's system (whatever it's called) on iOS or Google's Firebase on Android for that. There are also apps that let you use the open standard UnifiedPush, which let's you use any notification app or server you want.
So does a swap partition. I just meant that's an option as an alternative to it. But now that I think about it, not enough RAM wouldn't cause performance issues anyway, it would just cause random applications to stop working.
I agree with the others that testing in a VM (Virtual Machine) first is probably a good idea. Keep in mind that because of missing 3D acceleration inside a VM things like desktop animations might not work.
As for distros, I'd recommend Mint or Fedora. I personally use Fedora.
What's also important is the desktop environment you choose. The most popular ones are GNOME and KDE Plasma. GNOME is closer to MacOS than Windows and is made to just work while KDE Plasma has a layout similar to Windows out of the box but is very customizable and has a lot of options. Ubuntu uses GNOME but they make quite a few changes to it. Fedora uses GNOME by default but there's also a KDE Plasma version, I think. Mint doesn't have these 2 by default, you can always install them if you want to afterwards tho. The 3 options Mint gives you are also more Windows-like but I haven't tried them myself, so I can't tell you much about them. A VM would give you the ability to just install them, try them out and delete them afterwards. I personally use GNOME btw.
What I don't get about smart TVs is why you can't use it with your phone. That's one of Kodi's best features. You can just type using your phone keyboard. Typing with a TV remote is a fucking NIGHTMARE.