4 ms·

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 fo

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).

knowitnone3 10mo ago
you keep insinuating PRC yet you don't realize you're already pwned just running their hardware no matter the OS.
- bigyabai 10mo ago
  Point to the spot on the board where China hurt you.
  - arcbyte 10mo ago
    This is hilarious
  - nine_k 10mo ago
    ...and you would point at a backdoor. (If it is there.)
    - bigyabai 10mo ago
      I'd namedrop Salt Typhoon, but it feels a bit unfair to rely on American SigInt.
- dspillett 10mo ago
  Directly stating something twice is not insinuating…
eyegor 10mo ago
"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.
- Beretta_Vexee 10mo ago
  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.
  - margalabargala 10mo ago
    Is it? A google drive link to an OS image is worse IMO
  - copx 10mo ago
    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!".
  - danudey 10mo ago
    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).
dev_l1x_be 10mo ago
I have this experience with most of these SBC-s. The new Radxa board boots 50% of the time. The only reliable SBCs I have are RPI3|4.
- amelius 10mo ago
  I have a Radxa zero 3E that boots and runs fine.
- ekianjo 10mo ago
  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.
- nine_k 10mo ago
  Sounds like a faulty SD card.
  - dev_l1x_be 10mo ago
    I have 2 nvmes and i have tried it with several sd card.
- zeendo 10mo ago
  The Orion? God mine is so annoying. What a waste of money.
  - bschwindHN 10mo ago
    That's a shame to hear, I was looking forward to that one. So much hardware these days seems to be let down by bad software. I mean, I'm sure there's some bad hardware out there too, but it's usually the software that is letting things down more than the hardware.
    - zeendo 10mo ago
      Yeah. I mean, I still hold out hope that enough of the driver support will get mainlined or just rolled into some distro I want to use that I can use it for _something_ but right now it just sits unplugged on my desk. :( Last I checked BredOS was close to having a reasonable experience with it but I haven't had the time to poke at it again. Personally I'd prefer an Arch derivative like BredOS or FreeBSD. I don't really want to buy a GPU to put in it but it seems like that's my only option at the moment?
apple4ever 10mo ago
That's always the problem with these non-Pi SBCs. They never have good software support.
- rbanffy 10mo ago
  Even bigger brands such as Nvidia seem to expect us to recycle SBCs every couple years.
  - yonatan8070 10mo ago
    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".
    - zipy124 10mo ago
      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.
      - yonatan8070 10mo ago
        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.
- ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
  The NanoPi models from FriendlyElec tend to have better support.
- buccal 10mo ago
  Olimex does provide both open source hardware and open source software for example: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/STMP1/STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/STMP1/STMP157-OLin...
bjackman 10mo ago
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).
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  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?
  - voakbasda 10mo ago
    At my last job, I found Toradex boards well-supported by Yocto. YMMV
    - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
      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.
  - bjackman 10mo ago
    I would recommend x86. 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).
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

knowitnone3 10mo ago

you keep insinuating PRC yet you don't realize you're already pwned just running their hardware no matter the OS.

bigyabai 10mo ago
Point to the spot on the board where China hurt you.
- arcbyte 10mo ago
  This is hilarious
- nine_k 10mo ago
  ...and you would point at a backdoor. (If it is there.)
  - bigyabai 10mo ago
    I'd namedrop Salt Typhoon, but it feels a bit unfair to rely on American SigInt.
dspillett 10mo ago
Directly stating something twice is not insinuating…

eyegor 10mo ago

"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.

Beretta_Vexee 10mo ago
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.
- margalabargala 10mo ago
  Is it? A google drive link to an OS image is worse IMO
- copx 10mo ago
  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!".
- danudey 10mo ago
  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).

dev_l1x_be 10mo ago

I have this experience with most of these SBC-s. The new Radxa board boots 50% of the time. The only reliable SBCs I have are RPI3|4.

amelius 10mo ago
I have a Radxa zero 3E that boots and runs fine.
ekianjo 10mo ago
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.
nine_k 10mo ago
Sounds like a faulty SD card.
- dev_l1x_be 10mo ago
  I have 2 nvmes and i have tried it with several sd card.
zeendo 10mo ago
The Orion? God mine is so annoying. What a waste of money.
- bschwindHN 10mo ago
  That's a shame to hear, I was looking forward to that one. So much hardware these days seems to be let down by bad software. I mean, I'm sure there's some bad hardware out there too, but it's usually the software that is letting things down more than the hardware.
  - zeendo 10mo ago
    Yeah. I mean, I still hold out hope that enough of the driver support will get mainlined or just rolled into some distro I want to use that I can use it for _something_ but right now it just sits unplugged on my desk. :( Last I checked BredOS was close to having a reasonable experience with it but I haven't had the time to poke at it again. Personally I'd prefer an Arch derivative like BredOS or FreeBSD. I don't really want to buy a GPU to put in it but it seems like that's my only option at the moment?

apple4ever 10mo ago

That's always the problem with these non-Pi SBCs. They never have good software support.

rbanffy 10mo ago
Even bigger brands such as Nvidia seem to expect us to recycle SBCs every couple years.
- yonatan8070 10mo ago
  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".
  - zipy124 10mo ago
    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.
    - yonatan8070 10mo ago
      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.
ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
The NanoPi models from FriendlyElec tend to have better support.
buccal 10mo ago
Olimex does provide both open source hardware and open source software for example: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/STMP1/STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/STMP1/STMP157-OLin...

bjackman 10mo ago

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).

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
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?
- voakbasda 10mo ago
  At my last job, I found Toradex boards well-supported by Yocto. YMMV
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    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.
- bjackman 10mo ago
  I would recommend x86. 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).

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]