Can someone speak to their experience with these Raspberry Pi-style SBCs? I'm curious, in particular, if their performance actually aligns with their on-paper specs and how reliable they are.
Janky long term kernel driver support. Essentially you get a minimally functional SBC OS, and then have to buy another SBC a year later as the kernel developers find something more interesting to work on.
The Pi are not just the hardware, but foundation and community maintained OS too.
A functional Pi GPU took herculean effort (hardware codecs etc.), and years of dedicated people trying to get mystery binary-blobs to work. I think the beagleboard are pretty good too, but have nowhere near the user-base of the pi.
Many people are now upcycling low-power micro PC thin clients, as they refuse to get price gouged for a pi4.
They usually perform well, but get put in a drawer and forgotten about because the software compatibility is generally atrocious. Peripherals advertised generally never work, but you know, might in a future kernel. I've been burned enough that I've sworn to never buy a SBC no matter the specifications.
That's good to know, thanks. I've had pretty good luck over the years with ordinary RPis (I keep a couple around for random projects); the most serious problem I ever have with them is the long-standing one around slow SD card corruption.
The RPI is sort of the exception; I have a couple of them doing odd tasks around the house like displaying security cameras, but that's an outlier due to the massive amount of support it gets.
In boxes in the basement are all sorts of SBCs, from the original A10 Cubieboard from 2012, to many Hardkenel boards, to all sorts of bizarre barely operational SBCs from various sources. They all had the same issue of being basically unsupported unless you made it your life goal to dig through obscure datasheets and compile kernel patches from some forum post you found.
A good holistic replacement for the RPI is the APU2, a x86 board of similar cost that has a bunch more peripherals, real support for booting from SATA, ECC memory, and that sort of thing. Absolutely no video support, but I have years of uptime on the things with no issue.
Thinking about how much ewaste all those clone sbcs must amount to makes me sad. I fell for some pi zero clone too about three years ago and it ended up the same. Meanwhile my original pi (the 512mb variant) is still running Kodi on my main TV.
I upgraded from the x86-amd64 Mac Mini to Rpi 4Gb then 8Gb. Changing from the default window manager to KDE really made the pixels easy on the eyes.
Compiling from source code products like GNU Emacs, SBCL, Racket Lang IDE, TeX, Graphviz sorts of things is a breeze. I don't feel like I am being pushed around like China's Foxconn hires subcontracted to Apple that's looking to buy the Man. U's soccer/football hooligan fanbase.
The FLASH storage medium is unreliable on the Rpi, I know, but I haven't got around to finding something faster and durable and easily replaceable. Samsung has durable external USB devices from what the advertising says.
There are times on the Rpi when the cpu load shoots up, I guess that is due to Garbage In Garbage Out website JS stealing cpu cycles to mine tokens.
I paid $5 for the $50 discount on the 16Gb RockX5B Radxa but by the time they got around to updates on supply I had lost the coupon discount code. Threw it out in the old email box.
Performance wise they are fine, particularly the RK3588 series.
If you want to keep up to date, you will have to do some work.
If you want a seamless experience, use an x86 SBC, they work great, never worry about kernel support, etc.
You will pay for it in performance for watt.
(IE 5 watt rk3588 vs 15 watt pentium J6412)
There are vendors who seem to care a lot, like Radxa (who makes the rockpi series), and others for whom the sbc offering is basically a test kit for their android tablet SOC's.
Just get an Intel based SBC, they're around the same price and don't come with endless headaches because they don't rely on ancient kernel forks that will never have their changes upstreamed.
Edit: I should say x86 SBCs because there are AMD and other x86 SoCs out there.
Get a used NUC if you're not in for the gpio etc. Check power specs first. I've set up a Fujitsu NUC a few weeks ago for my parents as a print server and syncthing node. After enabling link power saving for the SSD it's sitting at 5W idle with headless Debian.
