[scarecrow420]

I had readed somewhere here that for IR to works as expected windows os and drivers should be installed.
The windows drivers somehow initializes IR. Then windows can be safelly replaced by some other OS.

You had readed wrong.

Thank you for getting me out of the dark.

Hmm, there definitely was talk along those lines though. I think it was the waking up from power off state with remote, it wasn't working on openelec/Linux for SOME people... then someone found if they installed and booted windows first, it seemed to somehow "initialise" the IR receiver in the NUC and then when they swapped back to Linux their power on from off state was working OK. I haven't read it for a while though so not sure if it is still an issue or not.