My experience with the OrangePi 4 LTS has been poor, and I'm unwilling to purchase more of their hardware. Mine is now running Armbian because I didn't care for the instability, or for the Chinese repos.
They seem uninterested in trying to get their hardware supported by submitting their patches for inclusion in the Linux kernel, and popular distros. Instead, you have to trust their repos (based in PRC).
"Chinese repos" is a very charitable interpretation of the Google drive links they used to distribute the os. It seemed like it was on the free plan too, it often didn't work because it tripped the maximum downloads per month limit.
It's always better than a link in the sticky post on the manufacturer's phpbb forum. I bought some audio equipment directly from a Chinese company, and everything look like a hobbies/student project.
Keep in mind that for a lot of Chinese companies, it's difficult to (legally) access some outside resources.
My company hosts our docker images on quay.io and docker hub, but we also have a tarball of images that we post to our Github releases. Recently our release tooling had a glitch and didn't upload the tarballs, and we very quickly got Github issues opened about it from a user who isn't able to access either docker registry and has to download the tarball from Github instead.
It doesn't surprise me that a lot of these companies have the same "release process" as Wii U homebrew utilities, since I can imagine there's not a lot of options unless you're pretty big and well-experienced (and fluent in English).
I bought a MiniPC directly from a Chinese company (an AOOSTAR G37) and the driver downloads on their website are MEGA links. I thought only piracy and child porn sites used those..
I am somewhat amazed how you can manufacture such expensive high tech equipment yet are too cheap to setup a proper download service for the software, which would be very simple and cheap compared to making the hardware itself.
Maybe it is a Chinese mentality thing where the first question is always "What is the absolutely cheapest way to do this?" and all other concerns are secondary at best.
..which does not inspire confidence in the hardware either.
Maybe Chinese customers are different, see this, and think "These people are smart! Why pay more if you don't have to!".
That was not my experience, at least for very large files (100+ GB). There was a workaround (that has since been patched) where you could link files into your own Google drive and circumvent the bandwidth restriction that way. The current workaround is to link the files into a directory and then download the directory containing the link as an archive, which does not count against the bandwidth limit.
I opened the review and immediately ctrl-F'd "kernel". It said no upstream support so I closed the article.
I would never buy one of these things without upstream kernel support for the SoC and a sane bootloader. Even the Raspberry Pi is not great on this front TBH (kernel is mostly OK but the fucked up boot chain is a PITA, requires special distro support).
so what would you recommend for arm which has good proper support.
I feel like rasp pi has the most community support for everything so I had the intution that most things would just work out of the box on it or it would have the best arm support (I assumed the boot chain to be that as well)
what do you mean by the boot chain being painful to work with and can you provide me some examples perhaps?
Ok that's mostly a joke, I'm just not up to date on what platforms exist these days that are done properly. Back in my day the Texas Instruments platforms (BeagleBoard) were decent. I think there are probably Rockchip-based SBCs today (Pine64 maybe?) that add up to something sensible but I dunno.
The thing with the boot chain is that e.g. the Pi has a proprietary bootloader that runs via the GPU. You cannot just load a normal distro onto the storage it needs to be a special build that matches the requirements of this proprietary bootloader. If your distro doesn't provide a build like that, well, hopefully you're OK with changing distro or ready to invest many hours getting your preferred distro working.
(Why only "mostly joking?" I recently repurposed an old ThinkPad to use as a home server and it's fucking great. Idles under 4W, dramatically more powerful than a Pi5, has proper UEFI and proper ACPI and all the drivers work properly, including the GPU. Would cost about the same on eBay as a Pi. Only remaining reason I can see for an Arm board is if you're specifically interested in Arm or have very specific space constraints).
Hm, if I may ask, what were they used for in your last job. To me they seem more entreprise focused than indie focused from a quick glance at their website.
I don't have any Radxa model, but I have a bunch of SBCs from different makers and I have never seen a problem with boot working half of the time only.
Open source hardware is such a fascinating concept, I had thought of such examples but I always assumed they would be the case of risc-v chips, I wonder how it's an arm chip
I always thought that one day we will get completely open source risc-v chips that if another company wants, they can create in their own chip-making process (I imagine it to be beyond extremely difficult but still it opens up a pathway)
what's the progress of risc-v nowadays?
Also Can you please link me other such projects like this, it would be good to have a bookmark/list of all such projects too
The Jetson Nano launched with Ubuntu 18.04, today, this is still the only officially supported distro for it. I have no reason to think this would be different with the Orin and Thor series, or even with the DGX Spark with its customized Ubuntu/"DGX OS".
I still don't understand why they couldn't support them properly. There are so many situations in which they could be better than alternatives, only to be hamstring by the poorest OS support.
You see, a small startup like NVIDIA just doesn't have the budget to support their older devices the same way a multi-trillion dollar company like Raspberry Pi can.
They seem uninterested in trying to get their hardware supported by submitting their patches for inclusion in the Linux kernel, and popular distros. Instead, you have to trust their repos (based in PRC).