what secret sauce makes kodi run so much better on LE vs Armbian?

    sorry, this is probably a stupid question. But what is it about LibreElec that makes kodi run so well?

    I read that LE is made to be the bare-minimum OS needed to run Kodi, but what else is there to it?

    For instance, I can install and run Kodi on Armbian running on a OrangePi3, but its so slow and choppy that its unusable. But Kodi on that same hardware with the LE operating system runs great.

    Obviously LE doesnt have all the unneeded features of Armbian or a separate graphical UI, but does LE also have "better" device drivers or something? Or does it automatically configure Kodi with some tweaks that are missing when i install it manually on Armbian?

    Thanks for any info, I'm just trying to learn...

    Good Kodi playback performance requires a combination of the right kernel version (and patches) + ffmpeg version (and patches) + Kodi version (shouldn't need patches). LE runs latest version kernels with patches (largely developed by LE devs) that improve codec and overall decoding performance that are regularly upstreamed but anything not a bugfix won't filter back down to the LTS kernels Armbian uses. LE also uses a more minimal/reduces kernel config that will be a little lighter on boards and latest versions of mesa. As userspace apps need to be aligned closely with kernel capabilities Armbian is probably using the default FFMpeg compiled with Kodi (right version but missing patches) or a general upstream FFMpeg package (not quite the right version, also missing patches). If you custom build Armbian with the same kernel/ffmpeg/mesa version and patches LE uses you should get a similar overall experience.