They might be good performance wise, but if you watch the Jeff Geerling video he mentions in the post, it will show you how much trouble he has with it. Custom distros with broken repos, non mainlined outdated kernels.
Just upgrading and dealing with downloading/upgrading the Raspberry Pi is a dream compared to the Rock Pis. The Khadas is a little better, but still I have a hard time upgrading it and sometimes certain images just won't even work from the company. Sometimes when trying to upgrade Rock Pis with eMMC you will find 2 or three different ways to install the freaking image on their own wikis.
There's also the "security" aspect for me, I really don't trust some of these distros (maybe I shouldn't worry??). A random image someone put on their website with broken instructions and messed up repos/kernels doesn't exactly instill confidence to me.
I will say the one GREAT thing from Rock Pi is their rock pi x. But it has an x86 processor and I can just install any distro. I wish they were easier to purchase and had more memory!!!
Pine64's QuartzPro64 board uses the same RK3588 in the Orange Pi 5 Plus and Rock 5B, and they're working on upstreaming support for that: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...
Upstreaming for Pine64 devices is done by the community: https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=pine64+rk3399+add
QuartzPro64 was recently mainlined by megous. I don't think he's employed or compensated by Pine64, but I'm not sure.
The SoCs are added by Rockchip, Collabora, and others.
To say it was trouble would be an understatement. Even after I successfully completed the setup (which took forever, as the documentation was contradicting, confusing, and felt like it was worse than machine-translated to english). Stability wasn’t there either at all. Occasionally it would just lock up and freeze, requiring a hard reboot. It would heat up pretty bad sometimes, despite an extra heat dissipator/cooler (that i triply made sure was installed properly). Webcam would randomly just refuse working (and I had to manually edit linux configs to get it to work in the first place). Sometimes SSH connection would just die and I become unable to connect to it again without either a reboot or restarting networking services on it (which would require me physically being next to it, thus defeating the point of Octoprint being remote). And mind you, I didn’t run it as some heavy production-tier 3d printing controller, I would print something a couple times a week tops, and nothing too complex or too high res (in terms of the model being printed).
All while Raspberry Pi has great documentation, and Octoprint setup on it is pretty much plug and play with just a few clicks of installing dependencies (or even simpler than that, if you install a dedicated Octoprint distro made specifically for Raspberry Pi).
If just for playing around paying extra for pi just to have something that works makes a lot of sense.
I've not been able to find any other SBC that is able to do that.