LibreELEC Takes Flight As OpenELEC Fork

[kaprikawn]

I do disagree with the whole 'libre' prefix but for other reasons.

As for pronunciation, eh, I just pronounce it 'leebah' despite knowing it's 'leebra'. I already cop flack for pronouncing linux 'lie-nix' so a bit more wouldn't hurt.

I think of it as lee-bray in my head

[kaprikawn]

Oh yay, More forks-of-forks because of developer disagreements. At least it's a whole distro this time, so hopefully we won't have a refresh of the ffmpeg/libav bullcrap.

I think it's healthy to have forks, it's one of the major advantages of open source. I agree with this guy starting about minute 21:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pOxlazS3zs

[caligula]

I think it's healthy to have forks, it's one of the major advantages of open source. I agree with this guy starting about minute 21:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pOxlazS3zs

Also if you like open source, you can now spend more time testing more distros. Fun times.

[kaprikawn]

Also if you like open source, you can now spend more time testing more distros. Fun times.

You know one of the great things about FOSS is the free bit. Testing distros is something that you can do. I was doing some Linux From Scratch stuff recently and was having problems which I thought may have been to do with the host OS that I was using. So I tried a bunch of different ones to see. I tried Mint, Debian, Slackware and Arch. I didn't solve my LFS problems, but I learned a bunch about the distros. I now know that I hate Slackware, I love Mint, and Arch is great for a gaming rig and personal servers, but not so good for LFS.

I can't play around with Windows or OSX in quite the same way. I haven't done a clean install of Windows in ages because I'm worried about product keys and such. My Windows license is fully legal and paid for, but it's an absolute clusterfunk of upgrade paths that lead me to my current install. I had 7 as a retail copy, I upgraded to 8 but did a dodgy registry hack to do a clean install rather than install 7 then upgrade to 8. And then I upgraded to 10. If I did a clean install now I have no idea what problems I would encounter activating it. As I understand it, my product key is kept in UEFI now, and if I did a reinstall it would just activate from that, but I can't rely on it.

And forget OSX, I have literally not used it since 1997. My wallet can't handle being Apple's bitch.

So I wouldn't go bemoaning trying out Linux stuff. It may take a little time and effort, but at least you can try different stuff and see whether it's for you. To see whether Windows is for you costs like $100 or something. To see whether OSX is for you costs thousands. To see whether a Linux distro is for you is a quick download/torrent + install. If you don't like it, wipe it and try another. That's what I did. Testing a few distros is a lot less painful than using proprietary software.

[liam]

Just how forked are we?

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but was xbmc a fork of mythTV?
So, that's around four nested forks to get to libreelec?

[hochopeper]

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but was xbmc a fork of mythTV?

Don't think so.

xbox media centre -> xbmc -> kodi were just rebranding afaik. I don't think there was any mythTV fork in that.

I can only see one fork in this case.

[Kano]

I compiled OpenELEC git for RPi (2) some months ago as a suggested patch for my DVB-S2 adapter was not added. Let's see if it is easier to get that into LibreELEC. For me the name does not matter. I test SPMC for Android too - a Kodi fork.

[raom]

I do disagree with the whole 'libre' prefix but for other reasons.

First thing I think when I see it is commies with their heads up their asses.

[devius]

But it's not being appended to other Spanish words, maybe that's what makes it so weird.

I agree it looks weird. Although ELEC is not a word, so there's that.

[M@yeulC]

Just how forked are we?

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but was xbmc a fork of mythTV?
So, that's around four nested forks to get to libreelec?

AFAIR XBMC was a merger between Xbox media player and an other video player for the first Xbox. It gave birth to XBox Media Center, then just XBMC, then kodi.
And I saw an enormous rise in adoption since the last renaming.


Prefixing things with libre is a bit strange, but it doesn't bother me that much (full disclosure: I'm French too). I just often ship the "e" in libre, effectively pronouncing it "libroffice" or "librelec". That way,I don't find it shocking. It's a bit more difficult with consomns like libreboot, for which I definitely pronounce the " e".

As for the fork itself, it's quite a good thing IMO, as the development process always seemed a bit obscure to me. Oh, and I like this prefix because it often (if not always) means that the result ends up being "freer" than just open source.