Ya, LibreElec is what you are referring to probably. That was actually the first thing I tried and wow was it unstable. Averaged maybe 5 or 6 crahes per day. And their forums were near useless, the devs there were closing nearly every ticket due to piracy.
Once I got onto a standard distro things improved dramatically. First I tried the Plex desktop app. No hardware decoding, so the thing couldn't really play 4k at all. Then I tried Jellyfin. That couldn't play anything period, and the remote didn't work.
Kodi worked immediately, minus audio passthrough. Took hours to figure that out.
Once you get it all working it's awesome and it's what I use to this day. But I would only ever suggest it to someone if they are willing to go 100% pirate and willing to troubleshoot. It was literal weeks to get all the quirks worked out.