No, LE is not Debian. It's an appliance like distribution built into a single squashfs file that's mounted read-only. It's designed to contain the bare essentials needed to run Kodi. You can only write to the /storage partition. There is the possibility of installing addons, but the availability of quality addons for the software you need may vary.
Ok, thanks.
Suppose I use LibreElec as a starting point (because watching stuff on TV is the primary use of my Pi) but I want to do a little development, run OpenVPN, an FTP server etc. Will I run into problems doing this, or can I SSH to the Pi and apt-get install whatever I want like on a regular Debian? If it's ok to do so, should I avoid upgrading any core OS components (ie avoid dist-upgrades etc)?
I ask because Kodi generally works fine on my current Raspbian install but occasionally I have trouble connecting, and the Pi rebooted itself once after it had not been used for 30 mins or so, during an attempt to connect to it via Kore (Android app). I figured if anything was going to work, it would be LibreElec (initially with nothing else installed, as a sanity check).
