

Agreed the Nvidia shield in its later updates to the OS really went heavy on the ads.
One way around this is with a OS downgrade and sticking with OS version 8.2.3 and not upgrading the home launcher, or replacing it with another launcher internally.
These were the steps I followed to downgrade all my Nvidia shield around the house.
https://florisse.nl/shield-downgrade/
Definitely on the lookout for a new media box though and the one you mentioned caught my eye as well.












I been running a virtualized pfsense on a PC using Proxmox. It’s been serving me well for the last 2-3 years.
https://imgur.com/a/zUD0jx2
The benefits of running it on proxmox gives me the option to virtualize a few more servers on the same hardware.
And as a few people have pointed out in the comments, it’s not the hardware that’s providing the security per say, it’s the software you are running.
A PC running OpenWRT vs a modem running OpenWRT are more or less the same.