This has often been the case in the past but the situation is much improved now.
For example I have an Orange Pi 5 Plus running the totally generic aarch64 image of Home Assistant OS [0]. Zero customization was needed, it just works with mainline everything.
There's even UEFI [1].
Granted this isn't the case for all boards but Rockchip at least seems to have great upstream support.
Yeah but you can get a n100 on sale for about the same price, and it comes with a case, nvme storage (way better then sd card), power supply, proper cooling solution, and less maintanance…
The Orange Pi 5 Plus on its own should be much cheaper than an N100 system. Only when you add in those extras does the price even out. I bought mine in an overpriced bundle for 182€ a few months ago.
It supports NVMe SSDs same as an N100.
Maintenance is exactly the same; they both run mainline Linux.
Where the N100 perhaps wins is in performance.
Where the Orange Pi 5 Plus (and other RK3588-based boards) wins is in power usage, especially for always-on, low-utilization applications.
You can get an n100 system for $110 on sale. Price went up but I still see $135 on eBay now. However YMMV because Europe prices are different
For power I don’t know about orange pi 5 but for many SBC power was a mixed bag. I had pretty bad luck with random SBC taking way more power for random reasons and not putting devices in idle mode. Even raspberry pi was pretty bad when it launched.
It’s frustrating because it’s hard to fix. With x64 you can often go into bios and enable power modes, but that’s not the case with arm. For example pcie4 can easily draw 2w+ when active. (The interface!)
My n100 takes 6W and 8w (8 and 16gb). If pi5 takes 3w that’s not large enough to matter especially when it’s so inconsistent.
Now one place where I used to like rpi zero was gpio access. However I’m transitioning to rp2350 as it’s just better suited for that kind of work, easier to find and cheaper.
I have no idea what US prices are like but I put in a reasonable amount of effort and at least right now here in Europe, N100 and RK3588 prices are pretty similar for comparable packages (RAM, case, power etc.). One other thing to note is that the N100 is DDR4 while the RK3588 uses DDR5.
I never ran into that bug but I came to the Orange Pi 5 Plus in 2025, so there's a chance the issues were all worked out by the time I started using it.
Looking at a couple of reviews, the Orange Pi 5 Plus drew ~4W idle [0] while an N100 system drew ~10W [1].
1W over a year is 8.76kWh, which here costs ~$2. If those numbers hold (and I'm not saying they do necessarily but for the sake of argument) and with an estimated lifespan of 5 years, you might be looking at a TCO of $140 hardware + $40 power = $180 for an Orange Pi 5 vs. $140 hardware + $100 power = $240 for an N100. That would put an N100 at 33% more expensive. Even if it draws just 6W compared to 4W, that's $200 vs. $180, 11% more expensive.
I'm not saying the Orange Pi 5 Plus is clearly better but I don't think it's as simple as one might think.
For example I have an Orange Pi 5 Plus running the totally generic aarch64 image of Home Assistant OS [0]. Zero customization was needed, it just works with mainline everything.
There's even UEFI [1].
Granted this isn't the case for all boards but Rockchip at least seems to have great upstream support.
[0]: https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases
[1]: https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588