Last night when I tried to boot up my Raspi it just wouldn’t. Some kind of VFS mounting error? Possibly a result of changing some of the Raspbmc settings to “super” from the “fast” default. I found the response was slow for my taste and that maybe changing the profile would help. I have heard that some people corrupt their SD cards by overclocking the Raspi. Overclocking is when you make the device perform at faster higher speeds then it is intended to. Raspbmc settings should not have caused this, only if the user defines settings that are outside the limits. In any case it seems my SD card was corrupted somehow and so I would have to reinstall it.
I took this opportunity to try out the competition. OpenELEC is an alternative software that can be installed to the SD card to run the Raspi and boot directly into XBMC. Where Raspbmc is a stripped down version of Debian with only the necessary bits to have XBMC running, OpenELEC is a stripped down version of linux with all the bits required to run XBMC. Apples and Microsofts (AKA apples and oranges). Basically the difference between Mac OSX and Windows. They both do the same thing, just in different ways.
OpenELEC requires for you to build the images yourself. This can be rather lengthy and confusing for beginners. I looked at the instructions when I first compared the different options (and subsequently decided to go with Raspbmc due to the easy installation) and thought it was overly complicated. However I have found that you can download prebuilt images from users. Of course you should trust the person who compiled the images! It would seem that Chris Swan is trusted by many in the community and releases daily prebuilt images for OpenELEC. So I downloaded today’s image, used Win32DiskImager which copies the image to your SD card and booted the Pi! All in all about 5 minutes time. Much quicker then Raspbmc.
So OpenELEC booted up no problem, my LG remote works without any setup, add-ons installed and worked and everything seems normal! Honestly I am not sure I would be able to tell the difference between the two if asked. I do however find it a little bit quicker between menus and whatnot.
Another software I could try out is XBian but from forum posts it seems to have a generally negative view in the Raspberry Pi / XBMC community.
I will probably end up reverting back to Raspbmc mostly since it self updates and is easier to manage. It also has a strong lead devlopper who knows what he is doing and constantly implements new features. More importantly though he only implements a new feature once it is ready and this is the kind of developer I like to think I am. Plus having to rely on other users to build images of OpenELEC is not my cup of tea. Yes, I could learn to compile them myself but I am lazy!