kodi

Okay, so I got a Minisforum S100. The experience has not been great at all. Other than the very long delivery time that kept changing, it finally arrived. I connected it to and booted the PC up. Windows was loading fine on it, and I got that installed initially. Browsing on it and doing very light work seemed to be okay. Now, when I tried to install LibreELEC, issues started.

For starters, it doesn't use NVMe but UFS storage, which causes the LibreELEC installer to not detect any devices other than the USB itself from which I booted. Unfortunately, I tried to install regular Linux on it with the idea of booting up Kodi from there. However, many regular Linux distros also do not seem to detect the UFS storage. I tried a few distros: OpenSUSE, Arch, and at last, Fedora, which actually detects it. Fedora even successfully installs, but right after you boot into the freshly installed system, it will complain that /dev/fedora/root and /dev/root are missing.

After giving up on using Linux, I went with Windows. I installed Windows 11 IoT Enterprise on it, which works after doing some regedit tweaks to disable the requirements. Windows installed, and all was working fine. Okay, then it was time to install Kodi on it, which went well, and even the Jellyfin plugin installed. But any video playback will just hang after the first 10 seconds of watching. Audio and subtitles work, but not the video. Just to rule things out, I installed the Jellyfin media player on it, and anything 4K will just stutter like crazy, probably maxing out at 10 fps when watching, even when the stream is 100% compatible with the device (you can see this in Jellyfin server).

All in all, I will return the device. I thought it was very promising, but the UFS storage and the very underpowered N100 make it unusable for my use case.