Seeking feedback and advices for Linux-based appliances



    Hi,


    I am not sure this is the right place to ask, but I am a long-time LibreELEC user, and I would like some feedback from the developers.


    I have been asked to develop a full-screen app with a few large controls for visually or mentally impaired users. Something really rudimentary. No more than 5 controls per page, menu choices enumerated using speech synthese — the goal is to bring them autonomy for reading mail, ebooks, sending emergency messages (SMS, email), or controlling basic smart devices (turn lamp on/off).


    I immediately thought about LibreELEC as a successful example of Linux-based appliance. Given your experience, could you answer a couple of questions:

    OS and Hardware compatibility

    • Did you start from a kiosk-dedicated distribution, or from a slimmed-down mainstream distro?
    • I will likely target an x86_64 platform, but hardware compatibility is still a major concern. Do you have examples of tablet-like hardware that successfully runs LibreELEC (removable keyboard PCs, 2-in-1 convertible laptops, Microsoft Surface, rugged tablets)? I likely need support for Bluetooth devices and an embedded camera.
    • Do you have examples of (integrated) touchscreens working well with LibreELEC? Or some others to avoid absolutely?

    UI/UX

    • Do you run Kodi on top of X11, Wayland, or directly on DRM?
    • Speaking of Kodi, do you know if they run their own UI or used an existing UI library?


    Thank you very much for your time reading.

    Best regards,
    -- Sylvain Leroux

    LE was created using https://www.linuxfromscratch.org principles. It is not a derivative of any other distro. It should boot and run on any type of x86_64 hardware but LE is not a general purpose OS and it intentionally targets HTPC/SBC hardware and will be lacking drivers useful on non-target devices like tablets and laptops. In some cases you can enable drivers in the kernel when building an image. In others not, it depends on the specific hardware you're trying to use and what drivers exist for that device. As a rule we avoid trying to curate lists of "what works best" because the lists are never maintained for long and are outdated; and you won't find lists of tablets in our forum because people rarely use them and we don't have experience with them. There's not much need for touch-screens among our userbase so support for them is a bit of a grey area and our experience is limited/non-existent.

    Our 'Generic' image runs Kodi under GBM, while Generic-Legacy (not something that I'd guarantee is around for much longer) runs under Xorg. It can also run under Wayland which exists in our buildsystem to support the Lakka retro-gaming fork that leverages our codebase; but we don't release LE images that use Wayland (as no need to) and our buildsystem is missing lots of things you would need to create a desktop environment.

    Kodi implements its own rendering engine so you'd need to learn their UI and skinning process to do something. Kodi plays media well, but it is not a kiosk systema and does not support ebooks, email, or much in the way of communications. It could of course do more, but that's down to you and your development skills. IMHO you'll get further faster using a conventional distro or perhaps Yocto/OpenEmbedded which has a much broader hardware audience and more packages in its ecosystem.