Broken Profile Observations
#1
Some things I have noticed with profiles since about Kodi 14 (nothing really new here, just a collection). Currently, the stable release is Kodi 19, so these things have been going on for quite a while.


Why are profiles useful?

Yes, I could just add a couple of Kodi instances to a Windows PC (it's not that easy on Raspberry Pi / Retro Pie, but probably also possible). But that would mean, I couldn't launch these instances with the remote control ( I can for example just autostart one Kodi and switch profiles from there ), also there's not further control like giving an instance a PIN code or things like that. Also, with a bit of skinning, profiles are just nicer to work with than dedicated instances. And as Kodi has problems quitting an instance (Kodi just stays in memory for a long time after quitting), in theory, Profiles give a more seamless user experience.


Strange Profile behaviour

With a bunch of tricks, it's quite possible to use profiles in Kodi, but they are quite buggy. In my experience, it's easier to use them on RPi than on Windows, for whatever reason.

1) Profile behaviour seems to depend, on how long a Kodi instance has been running, before logging out and switching to a different profile (that's why I terminate Kodi before switching to a different profile, unfortunatelly, Kodi often doesn't quit quite instantly often enough). If I switch to a different profile with a Kodi instance, that has been running for a while, very often things like "Highlight colour" get lost for my Arctic Zephyr skin -- that reverts to the blue instead of whatever it had before and that settings is also saved. So everytime I switch to that profile, the highlight colour stays blue until I switch it back to something else.

2) Profile sources do not switch cleanly sometimes. Often, when I switch to a different profile with different sources, the TV Show part seems to be that of the previous profile. For example, when I switch from the Master Profile to the Kids Profile, I get the TV Shows from the Master Profile. Curiously, this is not true for movies most of the time. To fix, I switch back to movies (in the Kids profile), then back to the tv shows -- then I usually get the Kids tv shows. Seems to be some sort of caching-problem. Of course, if someone would switch from the Adult to the Kids profile, that might be quite a surprise for the Kids.

3) Even Auto-Switch. Sounds strange, is strange. When I start Kodi, I can log out and switch to a different profile (2). Now, switching to yet a different profile is not possible. After logging out from the second profile, I get automatically logged in into the Master profile. There, I can log out and switch to a different profile (3). When I log out of profile (3), I again get automatically logged in into the Master profile. Instead of these auto-logins after logging out, I'd like to be able to just select the profile I'd like to use.

In theory, profiles are great and I wouldn't want to miss them. In practice, I'd love to see some bugfixing in that area to get an seamless experience. Maybe in Kodi 99? Who knows.
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#2
Yes, it's understood that profiles needs some work.  From my observation, the "caching" issue I think comes from windows properties being set by addons or maybe skins and not being cleared when the profile switches.  I don't know what caused the "switch back to masterprofile" change, but I think it was in Kodi 18 and I think also it was done to prevent some other nasty things from happening.

scott s.
.
maintainer of skin  Aeon MQ5 mods for post-Gotham Kodi releases:
Matrix see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Matrix release thread
Nexus see: Aeon MQ5 Mod Nexus release thread
Aeon MQ 5 skin and addon repo 11.1.0
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#3
I found profile behaviour massively improves if you leave the main profile as a basically empty, dummy profile, then create sub profiles and only use those.

If you create e.g. a master profile and then a second one (kids, say) - you very often get weirdness from the master profile 'leaking down' into the sub profile.
Addons I wrote &/or maintain:
OzWeather (Australian BOM weather) | Check Previous Episode | Playback Resumer | Unpause Jumpback | XSqueezeDisplay | (Legacy - XSqueeze & XZen)
Sorry, no help w/out a *full debug log*.
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