[mdt623]

Greetings,  I have been using Kodi for a bout a year on a Windows 7 computer connected to my television.  Recently the hard drive crashed and I need to replace it.  I only use this computer for Television (Kodi, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc).  I do not see an advantage in purchasing a new Windows OS and am looking for advice on an open source replacement that will be easy to use.  I am not very familiar with many operating systems other than their names (Ubuntu, Linux, etc).  I did a little searching and found information about OS's designed for systems to use Kodi (OSMC, OpenElec, LibreElec) but as I said I know little about them.  

I do apologize if this is an often posted topic.  I tried a search of the forum and did not locate anything I felt was useful.  

Kindest regards

[nickr]

Give libreelec a try.

[dandnsmith]

Assuming OP wants merely to replace the HDD, and install software on it, then he should look for a free OS eg Linux
There used to be a distro for Ubuntu with XBMC (now Kodi) ready installed - but I think this was discontinued, and it may be necessary to install Kodi on Ubuntu or whatever.

I've just seen this thread about Kodibuntu, which may be worth following up

[DaVu]

Kodibuntu is deprecated now and not continued anymore. So this won't be a thing which is worth following it.

OpenELEC is pretty the same as LibreELEC. Both are read only systems and beside of Add-ons you can't install any additional software on it as it doesn't have a paket-manager such as apt-get. If it comes to one of them, I would choose LibreELEC as the development of OpenELEC stalls a bit for the moment and LibreELEC is better maintained for now. If you don't need additional software on your machine (which seems to be the case) I would also recommend LibreELEC as it will boot into Kodi directly and is installed in a couple of minutes.

If you are in need of additional Software I would recommend Ubuntu (or one of their flavours like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu) as the OS. There is a repository for Kodi while using Ubuntu and a installation guide for Kodi can be found here:

http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Kod...tributions

In the end, it also depends on the hardware you want to use. So to do a proper recommendation we will need some additional info about your hardware (CPU, GPU, RAM). Not every old hardware is supported anymore and if you own such a hardware we could probably stop you in wasting your time on unsupported things .

So first, tell us which hardware you are using and if you need anything else beside Kodi on that machine.

[mdt623]

Thanks for the advice. I think I will go ahead and install Ubuntu on the system. I will pull up the specs on the machine and post them here when I get them.

[nickr]

Actually the fact that Libreelec now supports docker means an awful lot of software can be installed on it.

[aht0]

You may not have to purchase new Windows. Do try simply installing new Windows (same version you had) and use the exact same key. Should be the end of your problem. Key itself should be written on a license sticker located somewhere on the casing of the PC.

Installation media ISO files are freely and legally downloadable from Internet.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software...d/windows7

[nickr]

You may not have to purchase new Windows. Do try simply installing new Windows (same version you had) and use the exact same key. Should be the end of your problem. Key itself should be written on a license sticker located somewhere on the casing of the PC.

Installation media ISO files are freely and legally downloadable from Internet.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software...d/windows7

Yeah but why not take the opportunity to upgrade to linux?