[Matt Devo]

Which leads me to my question. Anyone has tried or is using the chromebox CN65? https://www.amazon.ca/CHROMEBOX-3-N017U-...=chromebox
Would that be a good upgrade or would there not be a big difference or anything else to keep in mind?

I'm running one as my main Kodi device right now, running Milhouse's latest Kodi 18/LE nightly builds; I really do need to update this thread and wiki page to reflect support for the Kabylake-based Chromeboxes. But it's a nice speed bump over the older Haswell/Broadwell boxes, and the addition of HEVC/VP9 decoding is a huge plus. 4Kp60 works via USB-C/DisplayPort Alt Mode, but HD audio passthu working depends on the LSPCON chip used in the dongle (I've not found one that works yet). HDMI output is 1.4b, so limited to 4Kp30, but passthru etc works fine. You could always connect to your TV via USB-C and then to the sound bar via HDMI, if it supports input switching.

Legacy Boot mode / dual booting works thru ChromeOS v68; something in v69 broke it - not sure if AP/EC firmware update, or something else. UEFI/Full ROM firmware works fine.

One last question, I have been using galliumos for the past few year as it seemed to be the best option for that piece of equipement. Is it still the case? Could a plain Xubuntu or linuxmint work just as well?

Chromeboxes have always worked perfectly with any distro, the advantages of GalliumOS are mostly for Chromebooks. The new Chromeboxes should work perfectly with whatever you want to run, though I'd expect analog audio output (headphone jack) to be broken just like every other Kabylake-based ChromeOS device running a mainline kernel.