On a fresh rasbian, I've installed kodi from the package manager. I had trouble with making kodi run at startup and after some tests I came to the conclusion than kodi won't start if run as the kodi user.
When run as the "pi" user (USER=pi in /etc/default/kodi), service kodi start does the job and I get a responding kodi interface. When run as the "kodi" user (USER=kodi in /etc/default/kodi), service kodi start does start kodi but it immediatly hangs: the webserver does not respond, keyboard commands do nothing...
The directory /home/kodi/.kodi/ does exist and contains the expected file hierarchy (addons/ media/ sounds/ system/ temp/ userdata/)
Note: This question is indeed a duplicate, and this answer solved my problem. But I wouldn't suggest to delete this question as it describes the issue more precisely I think and it will help others to find the linked solution.
