LibreELEC
operating system - lightweight Linux distribution forked from OpenELEC as Media center

LibreELEC (short for Libre Embedded Linux Entertainment Center) is an up-to-date non-profit and fully open-source fork of the (now discontinued) OpenELEC as an up-to-date Just enough operating system. It acts as a Linux-based all-in-one Home theater PC (HTPC) distribution for the Kodi media center application software appliance and entertainment system.
The initial fork of OpenELEC was first announced in March 2016 as a split from the OpenELEC team after "creative differences", taking most of its active developers at the time to join the new LibreELEC project.
This is a conservative fork of the OpenELEC project with a stronger focus on pre-release testing and post-release change management for a more stable setup and environment.
History
Because of the end of Python 2 support in 2020, LibreELEC version 10 with Kodi 19 switches to Python 3. Therefore, addons created for prior versions with python 2 need to be updated by developers for Kodi 19 because Python code is not backward compatible.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “LibreELEC” is operating system - lightweight Linux distribution forked from OpenELEC as Media center. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through LibreELEC, operating and system, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28449365. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “LibreELEC” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.