I have a little RK3588 (FriendlyElec CM3588 "NAS" kit) board here and it's awesome. 4 n.VME M2 slots, 2.5gbps Ethernet. 8 cores. It replaced a 2011 Mac Mini as

I have a little RK3588 (FriendlyElec CM3588 "NAS" kit) board here and it's awesome. 4 n.VME M2 slots, 2.5gbps Ethernet. 8 cores. It replaced a 2011 Mac Mini as local Plex media server, photo storage/backup, etc. and it draws 3.5 Watts idle vs 7-10 on the Mini. It's running fanless for weeks now, and sitting in an old wooden Cuban cigar box (lid open). But yes, I ventured into... building the kernel & image ... and like a lot of these systems it was a nightmare of brittle shell & Python scripts, patches, many steps, and multiple, multiple READMEs. And because of its origin in the world of phone/media-box SoCs, the kernel defaults set up include annoying things like overriden highly-reduced VmMalloc limit (I work on my own DB component that uses VM overcommit at very large sizes) which I can't find the right knob to fix, etc. etc. But really, this is a very promising board. I hope to see more boards like this that lean into more "PC-class" capabilities than the usual RPi type sytems.