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Linux SBCs are in a bit of a sad state. There was a rush to the market, which has led to many boards being in a very sad state when it comes to software support
by DCKing 8y ago
Linux SBCs are in a bit of a sad state. There was a rush to the market, which has led to many boards being in a very sad state when it comes to software support. Moreover, no interesting SoCs have come out for these things in just about forever.
Software support for the Raspberry Pi is pretty good, but just about every other hardware platform doesn't get enough support. This is because the vendor doesn't want to, cannot cope with support, or the community isn't there. And that makes them very difficult to use. As is the case for this board. How do you release a board in 2019 for which the standard image is a three year old release of Ubuntu?
I'd say Odroid's announced N2 [1] is probably the first interesting SBC to come out in long time, just because it has an SoC that should be a lot more powerful and feature-rich than any other SBCs. 4x ARM Cortex A73 + dedicated gigabit + 4 GiB DDR4 + a Vulkan capable GPU is a really compelling package for $79 (or $63 for the 2GB model). But also for that it's a certainty that software support will suck, at least initially. They already announced that when running GNU/Linux the GPU will only support Wayland and not X11, and their initial Android release will run a 32-bit userland on a 64-bit kernel (how do these things happen??).
[1]: https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/ https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/odroid-n2/
- sjcoles 8y agoThe Odroid H2 is also a fantastic little bit of kit: x86, 4x PCI-e, SATA connectors, 32Gb of ram max. Great little low-power hypervisor for playing around on.
- ac29 8y agox86 SBC's are really in a different market from ARM based ones. The software support is vastly more mature, and they also tend to be more expensive (>$100 for x86, well under $100 for ARM). Hopefully this will start to change as ARM standardizes via things like SBSA and SBBR/EBBR.
- tracker1 8y agoI think a lot of this will come down to why x86 isn't going anywhere for a while... the tooling that everyone uses from OSes, drivers, etc around it all. Though once you've added a case, psu, ram, etc... I'm not sure you wouldn't be better off with an ITX build. (though it's time for a new nano standard).
- Matsta 8y ago100% Agree. This is why these boards are so cheap, and the board makers are putting very little of their budget towards software support. The N2 looks like it will be a great board. And Odroid is the best in the game in terms of providing software support. I imagine over the next few months, RK3399 software support will become more mature since there's so many of them on the market currently. Also found this wiki page about chip maker openness: https://linux-sunxi.org/Comparison_of_chip_maker_openness https://linux-sunxi.org/Comparison_of_chip_maker_openness
- fulafel 8y agoThe excuses seem to go straight from "too new" to "too old" without passing through "working fine".
- michaelt 8y agoIf the problem is "market demand too low to fund a development team that can deliver stable software before the hardware is obsolete" aren't those precisely the symptoms you'd expect?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- apple4ever 8y agoI realized that when I got the first PINE64. Sounded great on paper: 64bit, gig ethernet 2GB memory. But the OS provided was terrible. And there were hacks and patches all over the place. I would have loved to keep buying more, and the PINE guys came out with more devices. But I've stayed away due to the utterly poor software support.