[9] In March 2016, OpenELEC was forked after "creative differences", taking most of its active developers at the time to join the new LibreELEC project.
[10][11][12] OpenELEC provides a complete media center software suite that comes with a pre-configured version of Kodi and third-party addons with retro video game console emulators and DVR plugins.
OpenELEC is an extremely small and very fast-booting Linux based distribution, primarily designed to boot from flash memory card such as CompactFlash or a solid-state drive, similar to that of the XBMCbuntu (formerly XBMC Live) distribution but specifically targeted to a minimum set-top box hardware setup based on an ARM SoCs or Intel x86 processor and graphics.
But its primary competition these days is the array of cheap, streaming-only set-top boxes from Roku, Amazon, and the like, all of which deliver on ease-of-use and on ease-of-finding content.
If you're looking for an inexpensive media centre that is easier than the typical Linux distribution set up, then OpenELEC is definitely an option I would recommend trying.