Say you've got something like a Raspberry Pi, and you wanna use it for Kodi.

There are a few options:

1. Use LibreELEC. It's a fast, optimised just-enough OS setup for Kodi, and tends to get the fastest support for hardware acceleration since it's largely the Kodi devs themselves developing it.
   1. If you want to do more with it, see Doing more with LibreELEC here on this wiki.
2. Use a "real" Linux distro like Debian or Ubuntu. See Kodi on Debian/Ubuntu/etc for instructions.
3. As an in-between measure, you could use something like OSMC, which is stripped down and set up for Kodi but is a full Debian-derived distro underneath with apt and all that.