Full desktop environment in CoreELEC and porting vanilla Debian

Thank you for your reply, vpeter.

Yes and don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate CoreELEC and all the work they do but equally one of the main points of Linux is that of choice and clearly I’m not the only member of the CoreELEC forum who’s looked to use CoreELEC as both a media player and general purpose OS. When you consider that for many households, the only big screen (bigger than a mobile phone) is their TV screen, the idea that people could use that screen to both enjoy AV entertainment and actually get work done by plugging a very conveniently pocketable, decently specced PC stick into one of its HDMI ports is quite an attractive one. Particularly if they can very easily and comfortably take this hardware with them to use elsewhere.

Perhaps I didn’t explain well enough in my post but the point you appear to have missed is that, at the moment, there aren’t any other distributions for the particularly attractive hardware that is the BuzzTV VidStick Max ST-4000. Yet there are other distributions for the Radxa Zero, which runs on the same SOC and is supported by CoreELEC, who also happen to have partnered with the provider of VidSticks to support CoreELEC on some of their hardware.

It is this nexus that I am hoping will mean it’s possible, with help, to port some of those other distributions to the BuzzTV VidStick Max ST-4000.

I think it would be great to be able to get more from this quite capable hardware than just a media centre on its own.

Haha I didn’t miss beta’s post - I literally linked to it in the next sentence after the part you selectively quoted…amongst other things, I even described it as “seriously cool and certainly to be applauded”!
Even if CoreELEC’s partnership with BuzzTV extends to supporting CoreELEC on the VidSticks, using beta’s method would mean that you wouldn’t have access to the eMMC and the other consideration is that it runs as root.