What do you love/hate about CoreELEC?

So we always appreciate feedback about our releases and would like to hear about what you love or hate about CoreELEC.

Dude youā€™re kinda asking for trouble! :joy:

Iā€™ll say an easy one: the stupid ā€œgamesā€ settings button which pointlessly added an annoying extra row in the settings menu. Maybe stick those options somewhere else.

:flushed:

3 Likes

Ok, also something I love:

Has never crashed, maybe freeze for a few seconds, but never ever crashed to require a restart.

Crashing sometimes was always normal in LE 8.2.X, and Android stock, but never happens in CE.

By the way I have a Vorke Z6 plus. (And always use installtointernal)

I love coreelec and I also salute your efforts for us and whole community.

I love that it gave me an alternative to the Android OS that is default on my Tanix Tx3 mini.

I hate that I never got the experience of really using the Android OS on the device, which was the reason for buying it in the first place. :slight_smile:

Other than that, LOVE;
stability, stability stability.
Response to feature request - in my case NFS server.

Dislike, but not hate, that some forum responses do not make sufficient allowance (IMO of course) for users unfamiliar with CE itself and how the information is presented, although they might have experience with other OSs, even related ones like LE/Linux.

Maybe reconsider donations decision ā€¦ particularly for purchase of extra hardware for testing, over and above what devs might have personally.

Hate, inability to nicely express thanks to all devs for the work put into CE ā€¦ probably harping back to donations, or something less financial?

the thing i hate is that it breaks ARC/CEC of the whole system when shut down. but thatā€™s amlogic problem.

android has sleep/standby mode that works, though.

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In general itā€™s been extremely stable for software that has incorporated an alpha version of Kodi. I use it to provide a menu driven, Freesat TV / Movies / TV Shows / Music system for a holiday flat where it gets used by anybody staying at the flat (so it has to be pretty stable), and I use it at home. I used to use Libreelec with Kodi 17 and I am finding Coreelec with an alpha (now beta) version of Kodi more stable and functional than the Libreelec setup used to be. I appreciate that the Linux kernel is an old one but, with the mods, it seems to be doing the job really well. Itā€™s a great thing that it works so well on these very cheap amlogic boxes - most impressive. I really thank all those whoā€™ve helped develop it - you should be proud of yourselves!

I like that the development team seams far less prone to petty snarky comments than the LE team, coupled to this is the lack of an ā€œideologically pureā€ positions on issues and fixes. Refreshing.

I like the fact that my VIM2 with dTV board is better supported than on any other platform, and I think the level of hardware support is generally better within CE than LE.

I like the fact that InstallToInternal was reinstated and enhanced (an example of the responsiveness of the team to their ā€œcustomerā€ base) and allows my box to perform at a substantially higher level than otherwise.

It seems very stable.

The only issue that is a nark for me the broken search function - but thatā€™s a Kodi issue and cannot be resolved by the CE team.

Shoog

2 Likes

Looks at Lakkaā€¦ looks at CoreELEC. Wish CoreELEC had more game emulator bits.

N64 Emulator
Low overhead CRT filters (blargg ā€¦etc)

Possibly but as long as any negative criticism is constructive then itā€™s welcome, the new Games option does look a bit odd with the default theme, the only solution to this would be to move the CoreELEC option.

I hear you, the forumā€™s can become frustrating at times from those of us who moderate it and help users, so try not to take it to heart, we are only human and some days we get out of bed on the wrong side.

We try to make our HowToā€™s as informative and as easy to follow as possible for the less technically skilled people, I think this is an area would could expand more on.

Iā€™m still not sure whether accepting donations would be appropriate, CoreELEC is based on contributions from many different people and I personally feel uneasy about accepting them for that reason but there is a need to put hardware in the hands of the people who do contribute code but a lot of the time manufacturers will happily donate it, we have had hardware donations from LibreComputer, Khadas, WeTek, Minix and HardKernel but there is some things like SD cards, VFDā€™s, hosting, that we are purchasing out of our pockets to support the community and for that reason we have recently activated adverts on the site to experiment whether they can generate any income to compensate developers, level 2 users (regulars) and above are exempt and will not see them.

this situation may improve in the future with mainline efforts

We have people on the team who want to enhance CoreELEC in this area, itā€™s in the todo list :slight_smile:

2 Likes

It might be better, just for ā€œaestheticā€ reasons!

I didnā€™t realise it might look different in other themes: out if curiocity which theme are you currently using in CE?

I love CoreELEC, best OS for S912 so far, and I tested almost all available systems (OpenELEC, LibreELEC, Android custom roms, Neutrino etc.).

See my feedback below to your discussionā€¦

Like

  • Stability, running 24/7 and no need to restart
  • Based on Linux, root as default
  • New versions (fixes) very often
  • Relevant community, support

Future improvement

  • More fluent KODI UI i.e. 60fps / similar to PC
  • CoreELEC, new version released on defined period (i.e. every month / bi-weekly)
  • Map detail codec info as default (https://kodi.wiki/view/Codecinfo), instead of PlayerProcessInfo
  • ffmpeg installed as default
  • System info (KODI), if 8 cores are used (S912), usage of 4 CPUs are only visible (0-3), change formating to see all
  • extend installation wizard, keyboard layout, region format, timezone, subtitles coding, default video resolution
  • Update Linux version (i.e. Latest Linux version 4.17.15 vs. CoreELEC Linux version 3.14.29)
2 Likes

In regards to the Linux version, what youā€™re suggesting is going with mainline (or a more stable release), these donā€™t have the necessary support for Amlogic. Itā€™s a work in progress right now (not by us) and will take a wile until itā€™s completed. We are planning to switch to mainline when it makes sense to do so.

  1. You are able to achieve this by setting algorithmdirtyregions to 0 in advancedsettings.xml, CPU temperatures will increase whilst on the GUI though so you may need to look at additional cooling if this is an issue for you.
  2. I donā€™t think there has been more than 4 weeks between any of our releases to date, as a Team we did agree on releases every 2-4 weeks.
  3. This is something we could look at.
  4. Maybe put this request in feature requests so the whole Team can consider the request.
  5. Ditto point 3.
  6. This is something we do have tabled for the future but discussion on it is probably best placed in a separate thread.
1 Like

I love coreelec. Of course, I would like to try a version based on Krypton, since many add-ons are incompatible with leia. And the truth many changes that you have made in the kernel are very interesting.

Krypton is a step backwards and we are moving forward, you have LibreELEC if you want to go backwards :slight_smile:

I absolutely love that CoreELEC exists for my cheap chinese box. Itā€™s a media player for my 4k HDR setup, and it does a fantastic job at it. Especially the last release, has been excellent in all playback aspects.

Secondly, this thing has become my home server thanks to thoradia addons and docker. Iā€™ve connected a powered usb dock with 2 drive bays for storage. Itā€™s running deluge, sonarr, radarr, jackett, pihole, netdata, openvpn access server and duckdns client. It absolutely boggles my mind that this little thing is able to everything. Iā€™m out of country atm and my box is running stable with 9 days of uptime atm.

If i had one thing negative to say about it, itā€™s that the GUI isnā€™t too smooth. Disabling dirty regions and overclocking the gpu doesnt really seem to help much for me. The ui remains between 23-30 fps. I just hope one day AML releases some drivers which help improve graphics performance.

I referred to stability in previous post.
The below is from my Tanix Tx3 mini acting as my backend server for LiveTV and media sharing

CoreELEC:~ # uptime
00:47:30 up 12 days,  3:55,  load average: 1.78, 1.61, 1.60

It really is stable, and working away without a hitch. Doing so well in fact that I forgot to update it :slight_smile:

CoreELEC:~ # cat /etc/release
S905.arm-8.90.4

I guess I should do so soon, but I hesitate to change something that is working so well. :smiley:

On a personal note, it really annoyā€™s me when users choose to stay on old builds but there is an age old saying of donā€™t touch what isnā€™t broke.

70% of our users are on the latest build, with the other 30% on older or devel builds.

I donā€™t expect our latest version would be any less stable for you, the only issue for Tanix users is the WiFi but thatā€™s not a discussion for this thread.

In truth I had really forgotten about updating that ā€˜serverā€™ device.
I have a second similar device as a client machine which I use for testing purposes, which runs the current release and on which I have tested devel builds and Entware.

The ā€˜serverā€™ device is depended upon by the rest of the family ā€¦ TVs and mobile devices.
So I claim to be not as bad as I might have seemed :slight_smile: