Just had this happen to me. I didn’t really watch what I was doing and issued the “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” command which for some weird reason removed Kodi from my system. After reinstalling it with “sudo apt-get install kodi” all I got was a black screen instead of the Kodi user interface.

It turns out that the version I installed after dist-upgrade was not Leia, which I had before, but the latest release called Matrix.

It seems the black screen was due to one or more of my plugins being incompatible with the latest Kodi version. I did found a quick fix, but be warned that some of your settings will be lost if you do what I did. For my part, I had to specify my media directories again and also had to go through some other settings to tailor Kodi to my taste.

Here is what you have to do to get through the black screen:

Find Kodi’s database directory and delete all the files with the .db extension. After restarting, Kodi should work again.

On Ubuntu:
~/.kodi/userdata/Database

On Windows:
%APPDATA%\Kodi\userdata\Database

On Mac:
/Users/<your_user_name>/Library/Application Support/Kodi/userdata/Database

It is quite possible that not all .db files are needed to be deleted, but deleting only Addons27.db and Addons33.db didn’t work for me.

After successfully launching Kodi it asked if I wanted to enable my outdated plugins. Of course, I wanted to do so, but first I had to manually upgrade them in the Addons menu.

Everything seems to work fine now, and the new release is awesome!