I've been running LibrELEC on an Intel NUC 5I7RYH and NUC 6i5SYH for some time with great success. I bought a newer NUC 8i7BEH and loaded LibrELEC 8.2.5 (which is what I run on the other 2 NUCs) and it won't boot LibrELEC. I get a message "failed to start xorg" and then "Is your GPU supported ?" The NUC8i7BEH has the Iris Plus 655 GPU. Does LibrELEC support this ?

Excellent suggestion. I should have thought of that. Anyway, it did work and I was able to boot into LibreELEC. I can't load my favorite skin, Confluence (I know, I am old school). I get an error installing it, can't load dependerncy xbmc.gui 5.14.0 .

I am for now but can't go production in the house until the skins are consistent across all devices. Based upon some comments I've seen they plan to fix this skin dependency with the RC1 release. I am just happy that this hardware is supported in the next release. It's quite a step up from my other devices along with having hardware GPU support for HEVC and HDR, as well as HMDI 2.0a to support 4K @60fps.

Overall testing has been going pretty well with the LibreELEC (Leia) v8.90.007 ALPHA release of software and my NUC 8i7BEH box. The video playback is outstanding with CPU utilization very low and GPU hardware decoding enabled on all supported formats. The video playback quality seems better than 8.2.5 on my older NUC 5I7RYH. High bandwith MPEG2 live streams and simultaneous 4K upscaling put a strain on the old hardware and I occasionally saw pixelation and screen tearing. So far the new hardware and software are easily up to the task. I haven't tried any HEVC content yet but will do so soon. I am seeing a few minor quirks in the software but it is pretty stable. So far my other Kodi add-ons are working fine.

The quirk I am primarily seeing is in the network space where often on reboot the DHCP over wireless comes up in a failed state. If I go into the connection and hit connect again it quickly reestablishes. I moved the SSD with the Alpha build from my new NUC to my old NUC to see if it was hardware dependent and it wasn't. It followed the Alpha build. I pulled the LAN cable from my 8.2.5 build on my old NUC and was able to reboot every time and the wireless connection would work fine. So there is something in the new code or an Intel driver. I did download the Alpha 9 / RC1 code and it is consistent and DHCP still fails randomly. Ironically I tried enabling debugging to catch a failure and when I did it worked every time. I'll keep hammering away on it and try to catch a failure with the debug. It isn't a showstopper for me because I typically run in a wired mode but I want to try and help get it fixed.

On the good and excellent news fronts, the RC1 code fixed Confluence skin dependency and it is working now. I also see a marked performance improvement on my old hardware when I had the new SSD RC1 build in it. Previously running 8.2.5 when I was playing high bit rate MPEG2 video and was reducing the frame rate from 60 fps to 30 fps and doing 720P to 4K upscaling my older NUC couldn't keep up and I would get intermittent screen tearing and video dropouts. This was even with MPEG2 HW decoding enabled in Kodi. With the new RC1 code it played fine and the CPU utilization went from 60% to 25%. I am not sure if I can attribute this to the 64 bit code build, new Intel video drivers or the new video rendering method inside of LibreElec. Either way this is a major improvement.

I have it set that way "Wait for network" with a 45 second delay..

I ran some HEVC 1080P test files with my new NUC and the RC1 build. This was done using a Mezzmo uPNP server. The results were outstanding. Excellent quality, low CPU utilization and very smooth playback.

Audio passthrough is fine. No issues on any source format. I am passing through HDMI. The RC2 build is more stable and the only issue I have now is the built=in infrared receiver has limited distance so I installed a Flirc. This issue seems to be more common with the 7th and 7th gen NUCs. The other issue I am seeing is what many are calling micro-stuttering playing interlaced content, especially 1080i. This is a Kodi 18 issue across many HW platforms, according to the noise on the Kodi forums. All progressive content is fine. Overall I like the new NUC.

I can't speak for the 7th generation with regards to HEVC but my 8th generation handles it just fine. The NUC8i7BEH models have been on sale if you look around and wait for sales. I picked one up for $399 on Black Friday. I've seen others at $429 but I suspect they will be on sale again before the end of the year.

I would think so. My older NUCs are an i5 model NUC6i5SYH and an i7 NUC5I7RYH and both have been sufficient as long as you leverage their hardware decoding.