To be fair it mostly looks that way because ARM has ruled the market for at least a decade, and there's just so many of them. But yes, many vendors make no effort to mainline their code.

But some do, or pay those samaritans to, and as a result you can definitely get boards (including this kind of 5-port switches) that run completely supported on a mainline kernel.

My home gateway is a Turris Omnia, supported in mainline for years. I run a plain Debian on it, works great.

I have 3 Olimexino A20 Boards running on Debian stable without any external repos/software. All hardware for an audio/web/django/email/xmpp/backup server is running fine for years.

What did you use as cases? Or are they gathering dust in the open?

olimex has boxes for them: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/BOXES/

Ah, thx.

I've been using one of these to run pfSense (and recently OPNSense) for years now. Has given me zero issues. Also easily handles acting as a VPN server. Less powerful devices tend to be bottlenecked on how fast the VPN connection is by the speed of the processor (I think AES-NI is helping a lot here).

The sad part is APU boards seem to be backordered until next year :(

https://www.pcengines.ch/newshop.php?c=4

I was able to get one recently from one of their authorized resellers, albeit at a bit of a premium.

There are quite a few on ebay if you're desperate for one. Probably won't find the newer 4-NIC models, though.

Ebay or a licensed reseller (if there are any) should be easier anyways. I remember them requiring a VAT ID for EU customers. I ordered a couple for a small business so that was no problem back then but private individuals are pretty much out of luck.