The thing is, they care about privacy and such, but don’t know about tech really 😅 otherwise I would have gotten the easy route.

I know multiple people like this though.

In your case you should probably give plasma Bigscreen a try depending your hardware.

If you don’t mind a keyboard, I will say Ubuntu ran surprisingly well, but consider a lightweight browser unless you have 8gb + of RAM

Well, on a raspberry pi 4 4gb, no. It’s very sluggish.

Maybe on a 5 with 8gb?

The next device I was going to test though is an Odroid C4 (4gb).

I’m currently going to meet with Bliss Rom creators to discuss getting Netflix etc working on Android as well in a sandboxed manner that still gives 1080p (maybe standard Android though with Flauncher instead of Android TV)

It’s tricky to have a privacy friendly device that can also run mainstream, well, streaming clients.

I’m making this to make an easy to use box that works with a plain IR sensor remote for my parents (along with a customized Rustdesk client app in case they need help).

If that’s not a problem though (like you want to use Radarr/Lidarr) then you can just a Lineage OS version of Android TV, although it seems Konstakang’s version has issues with audio over HDMI on Android 12 and above.

I’ve been working on what you want basically for awhile now. But currently what I’ve come with is:

Plasma Bigscreen with Waydroid (and instead of Newpipe I’d recommend Stube instead in Waydroid).

If you do want 1080p for Netflix etc for whatever reason, basically sandboxed Firefox with DRM enabled with (streaming service website) turned into a Webapp