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ElectronicsHTPCHome theater

What are the best operating systems for a Home Theatre PC?

18

Options
Considered

512

User
Recs.

4 mins

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 17 OptionsWhy?

Best operating systems for a Home Theatre PC	Price	Based On	Default Desktop Environment
90 Geexbox	-	Debian	Kodi
86 Kodibuntu	-	-	-
-- LibreELEC	Free	OpenELEC	Kodi
-- OpenSUSE	Free	Jurix>SUSE	Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, LXQT
-- Manjaro Linux	Free	Arch Linux	XFCE, KDE Plasma, GNOME

Geexbox

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Top Pro

Lightning fast booting

The booting process is very fast, it only has a brief splash screen between POST and when the XBMC menu loads up. See More

Top Con

Issues with the Wifi driver

There have been several issues reported related to the WiFi driver adapter when using Geexbox. See More

Specs

Based On:Debian

Default Desktop Environment:Kodi

Init-System:systemd

Package Manager:Kodi

Top Pro

Simple installation

Installing Geexbox into a hard drive is very simple. Just select the install option from the boot menu and it will automatically take you to a screen where you can select your hard drive. It needs very little involvement and it's done in a matter of minutes. See More

Top Pro

Extremely portable

Geexbox has an ISO that is optimized to run on both USB and SD cards and of course all of them have the option to be installed on a hard drive. This makes them extremely portable, plus there are various ISOs for different systems which are about 150MB apiece. See More

16 Other Options Considered

LibreELEC

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Top Pro

Ease of use!

Ease of installation and small memory foot print. Boots straight into kodi. Lighting fast operation. Huge support network. Regular updates! Follows development of kodi closely. See More

CalmLodurr's Experience

Very Good ! See More

Specs

Based On:OpenELEC

Default Desktop Environment:Kodi

Init-System:Buildroot

Package Manager:Kodi

Top Pro

Free and easy to install and use

PoisedCastor's Experience

It is faster to accommodate for the newer Kodi version. It is smoother too. See More

Top Pro

Runs on a USB stick or SD card as small as 8 gb

Check here for full specs and requirements. See More

PopularHapantali's Experience

Only enough operating system to run Kodi, so very little resource use! EXCELLENT support and continuous improvements via a dedicated team. I run it on a mini pc from an sd card fed by a 6 gb of audio/ video files and feed my Emotiva dac with it. Awesome performance! See More

Top Pro

Runs well on a Raspberry Pi

Runs cooler than Kodi on a Pi. See More

Manjaro Linux

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Top Pro

Stable and consistently up to date

Manjaro receives regular updates, but more importantly these updates are stable. The updates are rolled out, which means you can easily update the software without needing to re-install. See More

Ben Guy-Williams's Experience

For my HTPC this is incredible. I can boot and choose 'Kodi' as the session, and it loads up Plex initially. I get no audio issues - stereo comes through two (plus subwoofer) and surround hits all 5.1 speakers with passthrough available. It plays anything and everything. Resource use is half what I'm used to with Mint and Ubuntu. I'm using Manjaro KDE - software is great, many packages look better on KDE and new software if available. See More

Specs

Based On:Arch Linux

Default Desktop Environment:XFCE, KDE Plasma, GNOME

Top Pro

Uses low memory

By using Xfce or Plasma (or LXDE, Fluxbox, supported by community) as default desktop environments, Manjaro is able to have a low memory footprint. See More

Top Pro

Different editions to select from + Manjaro community

You can choose between different Manjaro editions which have their own change in features, and there is also Manjaro community editions where the community can make their own changes. See More

Top Pro

Deepin desktop environment is a worthy attraction

Top Pro

Manjaro provides its own distribution-specific tools such as the Manjaro Hardware Detection (mhwd) utility, and the Manjaro Settings Manager (msm)

Run automatically during the installation process, it allows for Manjaro to work fully on your system 'straight out of the box', without the need to manually identify and install the necessary drivers or to manually edit the appropriate configuration files. Also usable via the terminal after installation, the features of the mhwd command include: The choice of free (i.e. open-source) or non-free (i.e. proprietary) drivers Identification and listing (general or detailed) of your system's hardware Identification and listing (general or detailed) of installed drivers Listing of available drivers for installation (free and proprietary) Support of hybrid graphics cards (e.g. Nvidia Optimus) Easy removal and installation of drivers (selected automatically, or you can identify and choose your own) See More

Top Pro

Excellent graphical package manager (Pamac)

Features include: providing notifications of available updates; mirror management; Snap support, Flatpak support and AUR support (with the option to suppress unnecessary confirmations during the install process); update settings (frequency, whether to check for updates from the AUR, packages to ignore updates for); and a history of packages installed, updated, or removed (from the official repositories - AUR packages are not currently tracked). See More

Top Pro

A rolling-release distribution

Manjaro uses a rolling release method for all updates, so once a system is installed, as long as the user regularly updates there is no need to re-install. See More

Top Pro

Steam installed by default

Top Pro

Very good looking desktops

All desktops look good by default. See More

Top Pro

All major desktops and even less common ones like Budgie, Lumina, LXQT, Deepin, Enlightenment, etc. can be directly installed from official repositories

Also available as independent variants. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation and forum

The Manjaro community is very helpful, and there are lots of tutorials. See More

Top Pro

Installation is a breeze

Calamares installer and MHWD is the reason why this distribution is good for desktop user- friendliness! Audio codecs, latest packages, latest kernel and easy upgrade to the latest build makes it the best choice for new users. See More

Top Pro

Friendly community

If you ask questions of users in their forums or on other platforms, they are willing to help you. Also according to the developers, they are open to new ideas in order to make the distro better. See More

Top Pro

Improved stability due to a longer testing period for new packages

Packages from Arch's repositories are tested (about two weeks) longer for stability and compatibility issues. Patches are applied, when necessary, before being made available in the stable repositories. See More

Top Pro

Based on Arch and user friendly

Manjaro is an Arch-based distribution with all the benefits of the Arch ecosystem and community but with the added benefit of being much more user-friendly than Arch. See More

Top Pro

Support for multiple kernels

Manjaro has built-in support for multiple kernels as well as a way to easily install them. See More

Top Pro

Arch User Repository access

Manjaro allows the user to access of the Arch User Repository, a very large user-maintained repository of packages for Arch Linux and derivatives. See More

Top Pro

Manjaro provides its own distribution-specific tools such as the Manjaro Hardware Detection (mhwd) utility, and the Manjaro Settings Manager (msm).

Run automatically during the installation process, it allows for Manjaro to work fully on your system 'straight out of the box', without the need to manually identify and install the necessary drivers or to manually edit the appropriate configuration files. Also usable via the terminal after installation, the features of the mhwd command include: The choice of free (i.e. open-source) or non-free (i.e. proprietary) drivers Identification and listing (general or detailed) of your system's hardware Identification and listing (general or detailed) of installed drivers Listing of available drivers for installation (free and proprietary) Support of hybrid graphics cards (e.g. Nvidia Optimus) Easy removal and installation of drivers (selected automatically, or you can identify and choose your own) See More

SteamOS

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Specs

Based On:Debian

Default Desktop Environment:Steam Big Picture, Gnome

Init-System:Systemd

Package Manager:Debian Package Manager, Steam

LinHES

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Top Pro

Seamless setup

The first time LinHES is launched, you are prompted by the configuration tool which is built using the same toolkit as MythTV itself. This allows for a seamless setup experience since LinHES automatically detects and configures the necessary settings correctly. This means that things like recording hardware, infrared receivers and remote controls are all configured automatically. See More

Top Con

Support only for 64-bit Intel architecture

The latest releases of LinHES only have support for 64-bit Intel architectures. While it's not worth it to worry about 32-bit Intel systems it's worth noting that the absence of an ARM release is problematic. See More

ReceptiveMoros's Experience

Finally a HT system no revolving KODI !! See More

Specs

Based On:ArchLinux since v6

Default Desktop Environment:MythTV

Init-System:systemd

Package Manager:Pacman

Top Pro

Great functionality out of the box

LinHES comes with a suite of programs already preconfigured to make it function as a media-centric appliance. Stuff like NFS and Samba are included for sharing files, Webmin and VNC provide remote administration capabilities, furthermore there are various remote system monitoring tools and packages for supporting file-transfer methods (one of them is Bittorrent). See More

OSMC

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Specs

Based On:Debian>Raspian

Default Desktop Environment:Kodi

Init-System:Systemd

Package Manager:Debian Package Manager, Kodi, OSMC App Store

Windows

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Top Pro

Widely used

Windows is the most-used desktop OS in the world. See More

Top Con

Uses more resources than most alternatives

Specs

OS Family:Windows NT

Top Pro

Touch screen support

You still can't get touch support on a Mac. Windows has had touch for 5+ years now. See More

Top Con

There are some privacy issues

By definition, it's spyware. Pre-compromised OS. See More

Top Pro

Best driver support of any OS

No other OS comes close to supporting as much hardware as Windows 10 does. Because it's the most popular OS, the bulk of hardware manufacturers support Windows first, and all other operating systems second. See More

Top Con

Unstable and slow

Windows crashes often and is much slower than alternatives, especially at file IO, which is important for developers. See More

Top Pro

Free with most new computers

At least the non-Apple variety at any rate. See More

Top Con

Weak default terminal

The standard terminal lacks basic features that Linux and OSX has. Alternatives to the default terminal for Window can be found here. See More

Top Pro

Stable

Top Con

Embarrassing to give talks

On conferences or in user groups the audience laugh at speakers presenting their talk on a Windows machine. See More

Top Pro

Ubuntu bash shell

Windows has a binary compatible Ubuntu shell to run non-Windows apps natively. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/commandline/wsl/about See More

Top Con

Scanning for viruses makes builds slow

Compiling a project means reading and writing a lot of files. Even fast anti-virus software slows down the build time (which is almost always too long). See More

Top Pro

Free access to great development IDE in Visual Studio Community

Top Con

Maintenance is time-consuming

Previous versions needed to be formatted ever 6 months to maintain performance. See More

Top Pro

Best support for Visual Basic

Top Con

Update policy / scheduling is a nightmare

Pop-up to update your system that will restart it if you don't interact quick enough and will have to be in reboot mode, which can freeze your activity until the update is done. See More

Top Pro

Windows comes first

Windows is the most used platform in the world. If you build something and need a third-party software it will most likely run on Windows. Not because it's good, but because everyone uses it. See More

Top Con

Limited in its flexibility

Window managers, startup systems, and system components cannot be changed. See More

Top Pro

The most solid choice for .NET development

Top Con

Lacks package management

It is not easy to install/keep current development packages that developers need and use. See More

Top Con

Most software is closed source, including the operating system itself

Arch Linux

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Top Pro

Huge Repositories

Although Arch Linux only comes with around 10,000 packages, you can use the Arch User Repositories (AUR) which will add over 50,000 more packages. See More

Specs

Based On:Independent

Default Desktop Environment:N/A

Init-System:Systemd

Package Manager:Pacman

Top Pro

Excellent package management with the AUR

The AUR is a repository with a very extensive catalogue of build/install scripts that are contributed by users. While these scripts are inherently less secure than conventional packages maintained by a distro's authors, it's still way easier to verify the security of install scripts than it would be to write them yourself. It's very usefull. See More

Top Pro

As slim or copious as you want it

Arch keeps its core repositories slim and free of unnecessary dependencies. At first installation only a bare system is set up. You can easily get the other applications through the package manager. The repositories are nearly as full as those of Ubuntu, while they are often more up to date. That way you don't have to waste time with software you don't need or want. See More

Top Pro

Fast and simple package management

Pacman has performance advantages over apt-get and yum in both database operations (thanks to being written for speed) and download times (by virtue of using better mirrors than other distributions tend to select by default). There are also fewer default repositories to download from, and all package management is combined into one tool instead of being split into dpkg, apt-get, and apt-cache like on Debian distros. See More

Top Pro

A package for almost everything

If you need to install something, chances are someone in the Arch community has already made a package for it. This makes it incredibly easy for you to install and maintain all of the non-media content on your computer. See More

Top Pro

Cutting edge rolling release

Arch Linux follows a rolling release model, which allows users to stay on the most up-to-date versions of the software they are using. See More

openSUSE Tumbleweed

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Specs

Based On:Jurix>SUSE

Init-System:Systemd

Release Schedule:Rolling

openSUSE Leap

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GeckoLinux Rolling

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Specs

Default Desktop Environment:Cinnamon, XFCE, Gnome, Plasma, Mate, LXQt, "Barebones"

LinuxMCE

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Top Pro

Easy installation

The installation wizard automatically finds and detects all your hardware details and adds the configurations accordingly. It also asks for your permission before each step and then carries on the next screen. Everything is completed in 5 minutes. See More

Top Con

Lots of bugs

Unfortunately LinuxMCE has some very annoying bugs. For example there are some things that will not work with the default settings, and that's a real downside for beginners. It's also rather complicated to get a weborbiter working. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

Even with multiple features and options, LinuxMCE is still very easy to use; everything is very intuitive and dead simple to find your way around with everything being available through a point and click UI. See More

Top Pro

10 foot UI

XBian

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Specs

Based On:Debian

Default Desktop Environment:Kodi

Package Manager:Kodi, Debian Package Manager

OS Family:GNU+Linux

Windows 8.1

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Top Pro

Hardware Compatibility

Windows has excellent x86-based compatibility, and has recently announced ARM compatibility as well. See More

Top Con

Expensive

You will need to purchase a Windows license. See More

Top Pro

Familiar Windows Interface

As opposed to unfamiliar and purpose-built Linux distros, Windows still reigns supreme for sheer usability and ease of use. See More

Top Con

Resource Intensive

In contrast to many dedicated solutions which can run on nearly anything, running a full Windows install requires decent hardware. This is not a lightweight solution. See More

Top Pro

Customizable UI

There are many that can be used to customize the MetroTile screen and add custom tiles. Then, by adding custom tiles you can configure them to open any application or web page that you need. For example: Netflix, HBOGo or Steam. See More

OpenELEC

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