[shawly]

Hey guys,

so I got an HTPC with OpenELEC in my livingroom (Intel G1840T with 4G RAM and SSD). I always liked the out of the box experience of OpenELEC, because my Hama VRC-1100 perfectly worked without problems, but RetroArch has problems with OE and it always cuts out the sound after quitting, so I have to reboot.. Also Steam doesn't work with OE. Also my Xbox 360 wireless controller didn't work after I turned it off and on again, I had to deactivate and then reactivate controller support in the settings or I had to restart to get it working again, which was pretty annoying.

Because of that I switched to XBMCbuntu, where I got Steam and In-Home-Streaming to work, but I didn't like the Openbox popup messages about network etc. and I sometimes got soundproblems when I restart steam, also the boot time wasn't as fast as OE and my remote didn't work that good (probably because of the mapping which seems to be preconfigured in OE). Also Steam Big Picture was lagging, which is strange because on Windows on the same pc it didn't...

Finally I switched to Windows 8, where I got everything (except the remote) working like a charm, Steam started seamlessly and the boottimes were crazy, especially booting from hibernate (suspend to disk) where it was up in 3 seconds. I was pretty happy, but then the freezes happened... XBMC always froze when I was in the configuration menu of any addon, which forced me to restart XBMC again and again, then the freezes just happend while scrolling through my collection, which drove me mad and I switched back to OE and had to give up Steam...
Now I thought I might ask some other peeps, maybe you guys know how to get a stable experience where everything works seamless, like on Windows, but without the freezes and if possible without the huge amout of space Windows needs.

I thought about setting up ArchLinux (yes I know how to do that) and install everything manually, what do you think?

[jallenusn]

Curious if you ever moved forward with this Arch project? I've had a similar experience with controller issues, and lack of a seamless transition between xbmc & Steam. I used Arch 3-4 years ago and would be willing to reconfigure an Arch install for my newly built (and reasonably high end) htpc. Just curious where you were at with this and if had gotten started or went another dorection.

[shawly]

I tried, but in the end it was just similar to Kodibuntu and still pretty rough around the edges..
Because of that I switched back to Windows again where everything worked and the freezes where also gone.

Currently I got OpenELEC on my HTPC again since I never use In-Home Streaming and RetroArch is somewhat redundant since I can play every Nintendo console on my Wii or 3DS, every Playstation console (also PSP) on my Custom Firmware PS3 and Xbox on my hacked 360, so there is pretty much no need for additional Emulators, so I wanted to have my HTPC separated from gaming, the hardware couldn't handle heavier emulators like Dolphin or PCSX2 anyway.

I'm currently planning to recompile OpenELEC with Java (for Limelight streaming) and VMware drivers, so I can have a virtual HTPC on my ESXi server and use GPU passthrough to pass my AMD HD5450 to the VM, if I get this to work, I probably will use my HTPC for something else or sell it.
I already got it working with Kodibuntu, but I find OpenELEC is much more stable.