[birdwatcher]

I realize that the Kodi wiki says to use LIRC, but most other tutorials I have read indicate that the version included is faulty and recommend forcing installation of the older version from the Ubuntu Xenial repo.  Not only is this "hacky" but it seems to me likely to cause future potential problems.

On the contrary, it works fine in Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04, assuming we are talking about the method shown at https://twosortoftechguys.wordpress.com/...ntu-18-04/ (at least it works for most who have tried it).  Linux Mint may be another matter, some have said it works fine under Mint while others have reported problems getting it working (although to be fair, some have also reported issues installing and/or running Kodi itself under Mint).  I have never personally tried it under Mint because honestly I don't see the point of running Mint on a media center PC, which is how I view TV.

But mainly I just wanted to point out that the main reason people want to use (the older version of) lirc is that it not only allow you to control Kodi, it also allows you to control other programs and/or devices by using a .lircrc file in your home directory.  As a couple of simple examples, let's say that my media center is showing the Ubuntu desktop, in that case I can press one button (one of the color buttons on the remote) to launch Kodi.  Or if Kodi freezes up, I can press that same button and it will kill the current Kodi process and restart it.  But I could also launch other programs, or launch shell scripts to do various other tasks just by pressing a button on the remote.  Most of the people who don't want you to use lirc are advocating solutions that, IF they work at all, will only work inside Kodi and then only if Kodi hasn't become unresponsive.  I'm sorry, but once you've had the ability to control things outside of Kodi using your remote, you don't want to give that up.

Also occasionally you will see someone say to just switch to a distribution with "Elec" in its name, again to me these are far too limiting, what you do in that case is create a single purpose machine that can ONLY run Kodi and pretty much nothing else, in fact they try really hard to keep you out of Linux altogether.  I tried one of those once and it took me all of about 20 minutes to realize that I hated it with the fire of a thousand burning suns.  The breaking point back then for me was that you could not install Midnight Commander to aid with file management; I understand that now they do give you a way to install that but that still doesn't change the fact that you can't install or use most other Linux software.  Maybe some people are happy with that, but I sure wasn't.

What really ticks me off, though, is that installing the older version of lirc was very easy and it worked very well.  You could do it without reading to read a single line of instructions, if all you knew to do was "sudo apt-get install lirc" (don't do that now, you'll get the awful newer version).  Now, no matter whether you try to use the latest lirc version (good luck!) or some other method, it takes paragraphs of arcane technical instructions to explain how to do it, leaving those of us who are not Linux experts feeling lost and confused, and often with something that just doesn't work at all or that works for some keys but not others.  I have said several times that those who think it is easy to get the new lirc working should make a YouTube video walkthrough showing how they do it, strangely no one has ever done that, which leads me to think it is nowhere near as easy as they claim.  I wish the Kodi people (or anyone, really) would fork the older version of lirc that worked and put it in the Kodi repository (just rename it to old-lirc or something) so that we could get it without jumping through the hoops that are currently necessary to get the older version, although those instructions are far easier than any I have seen for any other method (and especially for running the newer version of lirc, seems like you need a computer science degree to pull that off).