I guess the different experience is because I had to deal with Allwinner. But even with Rockchip, different vendors have different levels of support. We had on

I guess the different experience is because I had to deal with Allwinner. But even with Rockchip, different vendors have different levels of support. We had one potential vendor that had excellent documentation, delivered the source code to everything, and responded really quickly and helpfully - in english - to questions. But they were way to expensive. And we had another who just gave us some mystery Android + Linux images, GPL violation included. No schematics. I spent some time porting Linux from one board to the other - they were very similar - but never finished, and constantly was afraid of configuring a voltage regulator wrong and blowing it up, or something similar. Compare to x86 where I can just order random parts form newegg, screw them together and pop in a boot USB drive, and it will mostly work. I know that you get what you pay for, but at least I would expect the SBC vendors to do hardware enablement, and provide some kind of abstraction that I can run my OS on (or upstream their code).