LibreELEC is a Linux-based operating system that’s designed purely with media consumption in mind. Pair it with an old (or new) Raspberry Pi and hide it behind the TV for an invisible and highly capable media center setup.
If you’ve been looking for the perfect Raspberry Pi media center, you might have just found it.
LibreELEC is a whole operating system designed with media consumption in mind. The first thing you’ll see on the splash screen when you boot into LibreELEC is the strap line “Just enough OS for Kodi,” which should tell you everything you need to know.
Kodi, previously known as XBMC (and the Xbox Media Center before that), is the best open-source media center project that money can’t buy. It’s a juggernaut in the space, having evolved over decades of development into a play-anything, stream-anything platform for the living room.
The LibreELEC operating system puts Kodi at the heart of the experience, which means booting directly into Kodi on startup. There’s no traditional desktop to be found here, just a media center front-end that starts up in record time. Unlike booting to a desktop like Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu, LibreELEC drops you in front of the Kodi interface in around 30 seconds from cold (when booting from a microSD card).
This makes it a lightweight operating system, with the total size of the LibreELEC operating system included in a 160MB download. Once installed, I had around 15GB of free space on my…