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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

Before someone starts the usual yadda yadda about the RPi biger community, the OS not having long time support etc. I would repeat one more time: do not rely on board vendor supplied images; this is valid for pretty much all boards. Just go to Armbian or DietPi pages and you'll almost certainly find one or more images that work on your board and forums to discuss about them with very knowledgeable people.

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://dietpi.com/#download

Those projects are well worth a contribution, as they don't have a giant like Broadcom behind them.

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I agree they're worth a contribution, but sometimes I just want a device to work and even Armbian isn't as well supported as Raspberry Pi OS. For example 2 days ago I tried to get my Orange Pi 4 working. It turns out Armbian's Orange Pi 4 builds have had broken HDMI for months. There's value in having something just work.

There's already a post about this issue on the forums, and a fix: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26818-opi-4-lts-no-hdmi-outp... . But the precompiled version offered isn't for my board (I have the non-LTS version), so I'll have to compile it myself.

Why not rely on them if they do the job? What is the objection?

Or why not take advantage of the absolutely trivial deployment that the Raspberry Pi Imager offers?

This is like the place the 3D printing world has been in for the last two or three years. Why is it not OK to want to just do stuff and not think about performance-tuning the hardware before you do stuff?

Some of us just want to make stuff, not tinker with the tools.

Just adding in a link to their Donation page at https://www.armbian.com/donate/

I'm not affiliated with them or anything, but also appreciate their efforts and have a small recurring donation set up in the hopes of seeing it continue. Especially for groups like this that have image hosting and hardware costs, even a few dollars can make the maintainers' load lighter and help them continue doing this kind of quiet, important work.

> I would repeat one more time: do not rely on board vendor supplied images; this is valid for pretty much all boards

It's not valid, it's not even an argument.

Armbian is great. Without it I would have never again bought non-Raspi SBCs.

Board vendors believe that it is OK to host their images on dubious download sites, with zero information on what the image is built with.

Why wouldn't you just use stock Debian? The first rpi used a weird CPU, which didn't map well to the CPUs supported by the stock OSs, but that hasn't been true since that very first one.

heh, because normal linux distros are finally somewhat usable with the rpi 5, let alone the older versions. neat little headless servers? sure. capable desktops, not quite there yet.

Lots of people have been using these systems on their desktops for decades. This meme really needs to die.

Yep. That is why I went with Armbian (even though I did test the OrangePi images while I waited for my NVMe). Can't wait for them to ship kernel 6.x support for this board.

Mind elaborating on this? I've always used Raspbian and am interested in hearing about the downsides.

Not to mention that if you really want to tinker you can use pi-gen to customise builds from a desktop without all that much difficulty:

https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen

Worth a play.

I was referring to other boards, not the Raspberries which have a well supported OS, apologies for not being clear about that. Other board manufacturers often publish distros which have been cobbled together with old kernels and proprietary blobs, then they abandon them when the board is declared obsolete. This is not the case of the Raspberry Pi of course, but for other boards I would check first the above mentioned distros before installing anything by the vendors.

Ahhh, I understand what you mean and believe you to be 100% correct in this case!

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