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Comment by grozzle | Hacker News Reader

There are tons of alternative single-board-computers available. The Orange Pi 5 is great for MUCH higher end performance but still under (usd)$100, and there are other options (Orange Pi 3? Banana Pi? Radxa RockPi?) that still match or beat the Raspberry Pi 4 performance for the same recommended retail price, but new stock is available for the sticker price.

Raspberry Pi OS is pretty much Debian with Broadcom drivers they haven't up-streamed yet. It runs on other SBCs, or there's Armbian, Arch for ARM, RebornOS, et cetera et cetera, all packaged for ARM uboot SBCs.

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If you're just using it as a simple SBC, OrangePi may be a good option... but the hardware support with drivers and whatnot is, to my knowledge, far superior on Raspberry Pi's thanks largely to the Broadcom chipset (vs the Rockchip stuff). For many applications where it's used to do hardwarey things, it may not be a substitute.

If you're just using it to run Home Assistant, or some server application, then sure the OrangePi is probably better.

My Kirb. What is this negging "yeah if you're into basic stuff" tone? I'm a fan of the genre, I own quite a few SBCs with various chipset manufacturers, and I use them for all kinds of things, from AI-vision voice-trained mobile robots to "simple" Kodi/emu boxes, and I can guarantee that so long as you notice the specific sizes and pinouts - CSI is CSI, DSI is DSI, Vulkan is Vulkan, et cetera.

Some of the more complex Adafruit / Pimoroni / Seeed hats are very specifically written for Raspberry GPIO, sure, but they have the problem of keeping you on an old OS after a year or two, unless you're willing to put in the same amount of effort as porting their examples to a different GPIO layout.

If you're into making custom stuff that fits whatever connector/pinout/etc exists, then yeah you can make almost any of these SBCs work just fine, no debate there. My point being there's an infrastructure built around Raspberry Pis that as of yet is not nearly as robust for other SBCs.

Is it worth like, $150 for a scalped Pi4? Almost certainly not. But I'd hesitate to say they're just strictly better. They're just different, and have different limitations.

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