> Also, not to be argumentative but the Kirkwood SheevaPlug line (I was early on that too) is the ARM equivalent of a truly embedded Intel Core something that n

> Also, not to be argumentative but the Kirkwood SheevaPlug line (I was early on that too) is the ARM equivalent of a truly embedded Intel Core something that no one dare touches if it's still running (it's USB 2). But unlike everything else you've complained about, it has good upstream support & is reliable & all it's peripherals are quite un-flakey. I have upgraded my kernels numerous times. I do run Debian/testing. I haven't in a bit, but they would still run, and better than before. You absolutely are correct about most of your complaints. There's a huge world of Ambian & other SBC that are off-tree semi-supported worlds to try to make shitty vendor crap keep going for a bit. And it's flakey, unreliable, & unmaintainable. But you are dead wrong about Kirkwood. Upstreaming means something & it has kept a lot of decade old devices running & stable & happy & it's just obvious. The negative experiences you cite are real, but they're a owed to a variety of over-aggressive under-budget hardware builds and more-so to never ever having actual real support, to never having had drivers good enough to get upstreamed, to being a bunch of shitty off-tree vendor code that is just poorly done. The network of enthusiasts trying to hack access to these sytems, to make off-tree Ambian or OpenWRT support at any cost is admirable, but ultimately, the actual cost of doing the right thing, like Free Electron does, is tiny, especially versus the pain incurred from not doing the right thing. I think you're missing that distinction, by lumping these all together. USB2 is also really not that bad for many remote-storage applications. It's also a bit comedic to, in one sentance, blast it as bad, then go on to talk about ESP32 systems & other microcontrollers. Which can almost never saturate even USB2, & almost never have any kind of USB3 what-so-ever. Sure they may run TensorFlow Lite. But they are markedly smaller systems. Just company community support seems arbitrary. Maybe Arduino has the best support community on the planet. It's still a vastly less capable platform with incredibly less software available to help you build systems/solutions out of. And showing up to Arduino will be a unique bespoke different experience, whereas running a Linux system will have a common frame of reference & transferable experience into the rest of computing, as well as having the world's best library of software & tools available for you to use (which Arduino/platformio have not even the faintest most shallow shadow of).