OrangePi Zero 3W Review: Tiny yet Powerful | Hacker News Reader

OrangePi Zero 3W Review: Tiny yet Powerful

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47 pointsekianjo4 comments

The Allwinner A733 chip here is still pretty mediocre for upstream support. There's people working on it, but the Rockchip cpus have the benefit of having been around for a long long time & having had many years of support.

Down for me right now but usually https://linux-sunxi.org/A733 has ok details. Where-as collabora maintains this incredible support matrix, which generally indicates a modern want for nothing for Rockchip. https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

I still bought two allwinner a733 boards, on an AliExpress sale. I went with the Radxa Cubie A7z, as Radxa isn't perfect either, but much better ecosystem participants than OrangePi. https://linuxgizmos.com/radxa-debuts-raspberry-pi-zero-alter...

The problem I personally have with OrangePi is that they maintain their own distro versions and do not upstream support as much as they could, either to kernel itself or to e.g. Raspbian.

As a corollary, I think they'd be much more useful if there were direct interoperability of things like the GPIO pins. As far as I can tell, there could exist a compatibility shim for software using wiringpi and wiring etc. from the RPi world, but trying to set it up is a software/kernel nightmare for anyone not working professionally in this space.

I gave it a shot about a year ago using LLMs, but haven't revisited it since.

can someone explain why these development/SBC/foss friendly boards always have terrible support?!?? Particularly in these areas:

1. no vanilla kernel support

2. often require patches and blobs in the kernel

3. worst or nonexisting gpu acceleration

4. just not opensource in general, from blobs to drivers, to closed source boot code

why are these boards being sold as developer friendly when they are often less useful than their x86 counterparts, and very often less opensource?!

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