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Comment by bringtheaction | Hacker News Reader

The Linux support of Pine64 was terrible when it came out. Is this still the case?

I bought one without looking too closely into it after seeing it mentioned somewhere online by someone who said it was cheap and it was ARM64. Only after it'd arrived did I learn that it had very poor Linux support. I've got mine laying around without ever having bothered to even boot it due to this.

For example, here's a key quote from what Hackaday had to say about the Linux support of the Pine64:

> The Ubuntu experience was tremendously slow on the Pine64 and I suffered several reboots. As of this writing, I have tested all of the software distributions on the Pine64 wiki. Only the Ubuntu distribution works poorly, and right now I consider the Pine64 to be a waste of $15.

https://hackaday.com/2016/04/21/pine64-the-un-review/

Has Linux support improved recently? Anyone here doing anything useful with a Pine64?

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The situation's gotten much better since Armbian started building images[1], but it's still running a stranded kernel for now. This is expected[2] to change within the next few months. I've heard on IRC of people successfully running mainline Linux on the A64 SOC, but I don't believe it's recommended.

As far as China single-board computers go, I'm pretty pleased with Pine's build quality and attention to detail with regards to electrical design that's reflected in their schematics. Community-provided Linux support has come a long way in the last year+, it's worth checking out.

[1] http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort [2] https://www.armbian.com/pine64

Moreover, ayufan's images (still BSP) are very solid and contain all the features you'd want and expect:https://github.com/ayufan-pine64/linux-build/releases

As a side-note, armbian's mainline is perfectly usable for headless applications.

I'd go with H5 based boards. A64 is targetted at tablets, while H5 is for OTT devices. That means, you'll get much better USB experience with H5. It also supposedly has ARM cores with less quirks than A64. I'm hapilly running a secondary desktop on H5 with no serious issues on mainline kernel + some patches. It runs non-stop with no stability issues. But I have a very good power supply and custom made cables, which matters a lot.

what H5 board are you using?

I'll second that.

https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...

See A64 there. Not quite there yet, but closer than a year ago.

Certainly not proud of the purchase... software support is still this bad despite two years already.

I certainly hope it's gotten better, I just ordered a rock64 O_0

The Rock64 uses a different SOC and there is a lot of progress on the development front (because its a new board).

Yay for new and shiny I guess. Thanks!

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