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> Your comment is why these people are often wrong.

Interestingly, it’s the opposite for me, and I almost exclusively see comments about software support & linux mainlaine.

That said, I think 90% of the time it’s better to buy small x86 machine than a PI. Those have great software support, are more powerful, and can be cheaper (slightly larger & no GPIO, those two are the main reasons to go SBC)

The difference is between x64 machines and ARM machines. The no-name x64 machines have excellent software support because they all run EFI and have fairly ordinary hardware. The no-name ARM boards have cobbled together bootloaders and require specific U-Boot magic most of the time to even get them online.

> In the meanwhile in raspberry pi land, you can just go to download a reasonably new OS image from their website anytime you want and it will run on all their models.

Are you saying that even with the Raspberry Pi we are still at the mercy of the hardware manufacturer when it comes to OS images?

I mean, nothing stops you from taking the device tree from raspbian and tinkering with other distros. But that's true for most other boards since they have to ship a device tree with their official image.

Raspberry Pi supports their images long term however, so you won't have to do that anytime soon.

Another benefit of raspberry pi is its popularity, there are just more projects out there compared to less known SBC manufacturers. Iirc the Archlinux arm project have images for the raspberry pi 4 (maybe 5).

I would second this. For SBCs the software support is the biggest deal breaker for me these days. Being cheaper or more powerful isn't as much of a benefit without the software ecosystem and community to back it up.

And then the construction quality/tolerance too. I've had Pis last for years and then cheap alternatives burn out after a few months of moderate use.

I don't think RPi is the gold standard nor is Chinese production that strongly correlated with poor SW support?

Raspberry Pi usually requires customisation from the distro. This is mitigated by the fact that many distros have done that customisation but the platform itself is not well-designed for SW support.

Meanwhile many Allwinner and Rockchip platforms have great mainline support. While Qualcomm is apparently moving in the right direction but historically there have been lots of Qualcomm SBCs where the software support is just a BSP tarball on a fixed Linux kernel.

So yeah I do agree with your conclusion but it's not as simple as "RPi has the best software support and don't buy Chinese". You have to look into it on a case by case basis.

This comment made me think that RPi is almost like a Windows laptop where the windows license price is baked in. But here is the price of constant maintenance of Raspbian and just drivers in general

Otoh RPi relies on completely custom proprietary boot chain, while many Rockchip devices can be booted with standard uboot

Do you still have to pay for a license to use the hardware codec on the RPi boards?

To be fair, this also applies to Nvidia and the Jetson line of products.

> go on GitHub or the manufactuer's support website to hunt down an OS image

If you're lucky! Most of the time it's a questionable Google Drive link.

The Chinese understand that everyone will be burned once and then never again(hopefully). Thats still millions of dollars in their pockets and not yours. There is a sucker born every minute attracted by the low prices expecting these things to work just like Raspberry pi. I got burned on the Cubieboard 1 in 2012. Still have that junk somewhere in the house having never run any major applications on the device.

I wonder if AI can help bridge the gap and provide the missing support that these vendors don't wish to provide.