CPU, PCI support is all there thanks to the QuartzPro64. At least with this one it looks like there are efforts rather than some of the other chipsets which don't have a chance.
I've been a fan of ultra-SFF computers since the original Mac Mini, and SBCs are just an extension of that. If you're shrewd and smart about how you use the hardware, it's a tremendous amount of real computing power that can work done cheaply and for little power.
For certain, even if I don't have own an Orange Pi, I feel I owe at least a hat tip to software maintainers for putting in the effort to ensure some other ecosystem has a future.
Definitely looks like there’s efforts to long-term support a lot of popular SBCs out there: https://dietpi.com/#download
The track record of the chipmaker is the important thing, to me. It's not always clear cut. I think now there may be a more formal relationship, but Allwinner used to have good support from purely volunteer Bay Libre.
I'm far from certain but part of me wants to believe that's in sizable part also Allwinner doing a less ship, less ultra-forked job in the first place when they dump their own ugly gross hacked out vendor tree fork, where-as many of these vendor trees are just wildly awful.
Again, just to reiterate, I would never ever use board count as an indicator. Especially these days where there are only 2-4 (at best) chips available for use. Of course there's lots of sbc with this chip: the specs are great, the performance appears impressive, & there's literally no other chips to buy. That the vendor kernel is garbage & maybe there are oodles of little design bugs is like, not a big impediment to releasing hardware. Alas.
I've played with these boards and they seem cool. I have a couple of NanoPi NEO3's because I really liked the form factor, and they perform really well, but I would never buy one of these and expect support. I would stick with Intel/AMD since they perform better, have better support, and the modern versions use little power and used is similar pricing.
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/panc...