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> Even the Raspberry Pi 5 [...] is still getting trickles of mainline support.

I thought raspberry pi could basically run a mainline kernel these days -- are there unsupported peripherals besides Broadcom's GPU?

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It takes a few years, but the Broadcom chips in Pis eventually get mainline support for most peripherals, similar to modern Rockchip SoCs.

The major difference is Raspberry Pi maintains a parallel fork of Linux and keeps it up to date with LTS and new releases, even updating their Pi OS to later kernels faster than the upstream Debian releases.

Also, unlike a lot of other manufacturers who only provide builds of Linux for their own hardware for a couple of years, it seems that even the latest version of the official Raspberry Pi OS supports every Raspberry Pi model all the way back to the first one with the 32-bit version of the OS.

Likewise, the 64-bit version of the OS looks like it supports every Raspberry Pi model that has a 64-bit CPU.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/

I can confirm that even my first rpi from over a decade still runs fine with newest dietpi.

Yeah I was very impressed at being able to download a raspi image last year for my original pi model B, most companies would have just told me to throw it in the bin and buy the new one (at 10x the price lol)

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