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Comment by bonkabonka | Hacker News Reader

I'd second that; ODROID is a platform to avoid.

A couple of years ago I bought a C2 and it still hasn't progressed beyond the 3.14 kernel required by the versions of Android Samsung was shipping on phones using that chip[1]. Also, getting the display working correctly with a monitor attached via an HDMI to DVI-D cable was obnoxious (again reflecting the CPU's Android heritage - hardware expects to be told exactly what's attached and doesn't try to detect anything).

[1]: https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c2/software/building_kernel

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I think it's more about aligning expectations.

If you expect a flashable vendor-provided OS image with long-term support and vendor repos that get continuous updates, I think you'll be frustrated with anything else than a Raspberry Pi or NVIDIA Jetson.

If you're fine with community images and configuring/compiling kernels yourself, vendors like Odroid/RockPi/NanoPi/OrangePi/Pine64 are fanastic. They're hardware manufacturers, not an OS vendor.

At least the spec is open enough that anyone has the ability to do things like Armbian without having to do reverse-engineering or extracting data from binary blobs (which is the case with a lot of other vendors).

The Odroid C2 was released in 2016 and is now EoL.

Yeah, I got excited about it because of an HN post and jumped in for the "It's just like the Raspberry Pi but more!"

For all my disappointment, it has served as a useful lesson on early-adoption and expectation management. =) So I'm not regretful, just cautious.

Even Wandboard (wandboard.org) has an "open" specification, although, the graphics chip (a Vivante GC2000) is closed source and the official binary blobs are working only in Ubuntu 11.10. Until today, the board can mount latest kernels, since it's running on a i.MX6Q Chip, but if you need something with graphics (even OpenCL), you're out of luck

Armbian has both Debian and Ubuntu running a 5.8 kernel for the Odroid C2: https://www.armbian.com/odroid-c2/

Oh, excellent! Thank you for that pointer. =)

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