8 ms·

I love that OrangePi is making good hardware, but after my experience with the OrangePi 5 Max, I won’t be buying more hardware from them again. The device is la

by BirAdam 6mo ago

I love that OrangePi is making good hardware, but after my experience with the OrangePi 5 Max, I won’t be buying more hardware from them again. The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. This also happened with the MangoPi MQ-Pro. I’ll just stick with RPi. I may not get as much hardware for the money, but the software support is fantastic.

daymanstep 6mo ago
Yeah that's the problem with ARM devices. Better just buy a N100
- simlevesque 6mo ago
  The N100 is way larger than a OrangePi 5 Max.
  - geerlingguy 6mo ago
    Also about half as efficient, if that matters, and 1.5-2x higher idle power consumption (again, if that matters). Sometimes easier to acquire, but usually the same price or more expensive.
    - spockz 6mo ago
      I can run my N100 nuc at 4W wall socket power draw idle. If I keep turbo boost off, it also stays there under normal load up to 6W full power. Then it is also terribly slow. With turbo boost enabled power draw can go to 8-10W on full load. Not sure how this compares to the OrangePI in terms of performance per watt but it is already pretty far into the area of marginal gains for me at the cost of having to deal with ARM, custom housing, adapters to ensure the wall socket draw to be efficient etc. Having an efficient pico psu power a pi or orange pi is also not cheap.
      - daymanstep 6mo ago
        Which NUC do you have? A lot of the nameless brands on aliexpress draw 10 watts on idle.
        Marsymars 6mo ago
        Not the poster you're replying to, but I run an Acer laptop with an N305 CPU as a Plex server. Idle power draw with the lid closed is 4-5W and I keep the battery capped at 80% charge.
        geerlingguy 6mo ago
        The N100/150/200/etc. can be clocked to use less power at idle (and capped for better thermals, especially in smaller or power-constrained devices). A lot of the cheaper mini PCs seem to let the chip go wild, and don't implement sleep/low power states correctly, which is why the range is so wide. I've seen N100 boards idle at 6W, and others idle at 10-12W.
        spockz 6mo ago
        I have a minisforum. Boost enabled. WiFi disabled. No changes to P clock states or something from bios. Fedora. Applied all suggestions from powertop. I don’t recall changing anything else.
        deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
    - fulafel 6mo ago
      On the other hand RPi doesn't support suspend. So which wins depends if your application is always-on.
  - blacksmith_tb 6mo ago
    There are quite a few x86-64 machines in the 70mm x 70mm form factor[1], which is close? 1: https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/Mini-PC/LIVA_Q2/ https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/Mini-PC/LIVA_Q2/
    - hebelehubele 6mo ago
      Lmao the hero background. They photoshopped the pc into the back pocket of that AI-generated woman. (or the entire thing is AI-generated)
      - blacksmith_tb 6mo ago
        I have an even cheesier competitor, which randomly has a dragon on the lid (it would be a terrible choice for all but the wimpiest casual gaming... but it makes a good Home Assistant HAOS server!)
      - 867-5309 6mo ago
        welcome to online shopping..
      - kowbell 6mo ago
        I dunno, I hear it‘s easy to put in your pocket and let the computer is everywhere
    - preisschild 6mo ago
      This only has 4 gb lpddr4 memory max, 1GbE and it seems no pcie lanes at all. The orange pi has much better specs.
  - moffkalast 6mo ago
    Well... https://radxa.com/products/x/x4/ https://radxa.com/products/x/x4/ It has major overheating issues though, the N100 was never meant to be put on such a tiny PCB.
    - nine_k 6mo ago
      They also sell a heatsink for mere $21 (on AliExpress), just in case you don't know how to fit a spare PC cooler onto it.
      - moffkalast 6mo ago
        That's quite a lot for the very heatsink that still results in those overheating problems I mentioned. A standard CPU cooler will not be mountable on this in any reasonable way, that's like parking a truck on a lawn chair.
    - sunshine-o 6mo ago
      I recently tested a palmshell with a N100 from Radxa too [0] It performs well but there is definitely a thermal problem compared to other N100 based systems I got. - https://palmshell.io/slim-x4l https://palmshell.io/slim-x4l
  - nl 6mo ago
    I have a Bosgame AG40 (low end Celeron N4020 - less powerful than the N100 - but runs fanless)[1]. It's 127 x 127 x 508 mm. I think most mini N100 PCs are around that size. The OrangePi 5 Max board is 89x57mm (it says 1.6mm "thickness" on the spec sheet but I think that is a typo - the ethernet port is more than that) Add a few mm for a case and it's roughly 2/3 as long and half the width of the A40. [1] https://manuals.plus/asin/B0DG8P4DGV https://manuals.plus/asin/B0DG8P4DGV
  - nijave 6mo ago
    My Ace Magician N100 is 190x115mm Big by comparison, but still pretty small
  - bawana 6mo ago
    Zimaboard2 has n150 and is smaller
- severino 6mo ago
  I thought N100 equivalent SBC computers like Radxa's, etc., were largely out of stock for quite some time now.
- Gigachad 6mo ago
  I gave up on them and switched to a second hand mini pc. These mini desktops are offloaded in bulk by governments and offices for cheap and have much better specs than the same priced SBC. And you are no longer limited to “raspberry pi” builds of distros. Unless you strictly need the tiny form factor of an SBC you are so much better going with x86.
  - colechristensen 6mo ago
    The mobility+power has been a thing for me. I can pick it up and take it outside with a USB battery pack and it just works.
- ekianjo 6mo ago
  The N100 is more expensive, does not come with onboard wifi, and requires active cooling.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    Once you get a case, power supply, and some usable diskspace is the n100 isn't that much more expensive.
    - ekianjo 6mo ago
      active cooling is the killer though. I'd prefer a board that is fanless any day.
      - nomel 6mo ago
        The Orange Pi 6 Plus has a fan.
      - mixmastamyk 6mo ago
        My N200 tablet (Starlite) has no fan that I know of. Not exactly the same but number implies it should be more powerful.
      - PhilipRoman 6mo ago
        N100 works just fine with fully passive cooling
kombine 6mo ago
I was planning to build a NAS from OPi 5 to minimise power consumption, but ended up going for a Zen 3 Ryzen CPU and having zero regrets. The savings are miniscule and would not justify the costs.
Aurornis 6mo ago
> The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. I think everyone considering an SBC should be warned that none of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be. Even the Raspberry Pi 5, one of the most well supported of the SBCs, is still getting trickles of mainline support. The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing.
- cptskippy 6mo ago
  > The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, Were people actually doing that?
  - unethical_ban 6mo ago
    They probably define general purpose as anything homelab based that runs on a commodity OS.
  - hnuser123456 6mo ago
    More like people try doing anything other than use the base OS, and realize the bottom-tier x86 mini-PCs are 3-4x faster for the same price, and can encode a basic video stream without bogging down. If the RPI came with any recent mid-tier Snapdragon SOC, it might be interesting. Or if someone made a Linux distro that supports all devices on one of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops, that would be interesting. Instead, it's more like the equivalent of a cheap desktop with integrated GPU from 20 years ago, on a single board, with decent linux support, and GPIO. So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between.
    - charcircuit 6mo ago
      Bottom tier computers were more than $25.
      - 6mo ago
notRobot 6mo ago
Have you taken a look at armbian? If so, what was your experience? https://www.armbian.com/boards?vendor=xunlong https://www.armbian.com/boards?vendor=xunlong
- BirAdam 6mo ago
  I have. It’s great on the RPi. On OPi5max, it didn’t support the hardware. Worse, if you flash it to UEFI you’ll lose compat with the one system that did support it (older versions of BredOS). For that, you grab an old release, and never update. If you’re running something simple that you know won’t benefit from any update at all, that’s great. An RK3588 is a decent piece of kit though, and it really deserves better.
pantalaimon 6mo ago
I thought RK3588 had pretty good mainline support, what's the issue with this board?
- BirAdam 6mo ago
  Video, networking, etc. To get working 3588 you’d have to go with a passionate group like MNT, and then you’re paying way more.
- cyberrock 6mo ago
  Hardware video decoding support for h264 and av1 just landed in 7.0 so it hasn't been a great bleeding edge experience for desktop and Plex etc users. But IMO late support is still support.
- ThatPlayer 6mo ago
  I've got this bookmarked for tracking: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35... Not on this list is the current GPU Vulkan drivers Collabora are working on too. Don't think that's really blame Rockchip since they're ARM Mali-G610 GPUs, but yeah those didn't get stable in Mesa until last year.
  - Muromec 6mo ago
    Current vetsion of vulkan panfrost notably doesn't run zed. Not just some games, a text editor doesn not get some surface extensions
- imoverclocked 6mo ago
  Yes, and no. I have an OrangePi 5 Ultra and I'm finally running a vanilla kernel on it. Don't bother trying anything before kernel 6.18.x -- unless you are willing to stick with their 6.1.x kernel with a million+ line diff. The u-boot environment that comes with the board is hacked up. eg: It supports an undocumented amount of extlinux.conf ... just enough that whatever Debian writes by default, breaks it. Luckily, the u-boot project does support the board and I was able to flash a newer u-boot to the boot media and then the onboard flash [1]. Now the hdmi port doesn't show anything and I use a couple of serial pins when I need to do anything before it's on-net. -- I purchased a Rock 5T (also rk3588) and the story is similar ... but upstream support for the board is much worse. Doing a diff between device trees [2] (supplied via custom Debian image vs vanilla kernel) tells me a lot. eg: there are addresses that are different between the two. Upstream u-boot doesn't have support for the board explicitly. No display, serial console doesn't work after boot. I just wanted this board for its dual 2.5Gb ethernet ports but the ports even seem buggy. It might be an issue with my ISP... they seem to think otherwise. -- Not being able to run a vanilla kernel/u-boot is a deal-breaker for me. If I can't upgrade my kernel to deal with a vulnerability without the company existing/supporting my particular board, I'm not comfortable using it. IMHO, these boards exist in a space somewhere between the old-embedded world (where just having a working image is enough) and the modern linux world (where one needs to be able to update/apply patches) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OrangePI/comments/1l6hnqk/comment/nlw3qvn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OrangePI/comments/1l6hnqk/comment/n... [2] https://gist.github.com/imoverclocked/1354ef79bd24318b8855277e909a404d https://gist.github.com/imoverclocked/1354ef79bd24318b885527...
Havoc 6mo ago
>The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. It's pretty hacky for sure but wouldn't classify it as useless. e.g. I managed to get some LLMs to run on the NPU of an Orange pi 5 a while back I see there is now even a NPU compatible llama.cpp fork though haven't tried it
ugh123 6mo ago
What specifically is lacking?
- Muromec 6mo ago
  Hdmi output on the vanilla kernel started to work thus year. Hdmi in still doesnt. Zed doesn not start bc of some missing vulkan extensions
  - mort96 6mo ago
    Oh they finally got that up and running? That's good, but extremely late. It released in 2021. That's half a decade. As long as running an upstream kernel means you have to use 5+ year old SoCs, running upstream Linux instead of a vendor kernel remains completely out of the question for most circumstances.
    - Muromec 6mo ago
      I used to run some weird 5.x kernel until I found about collabora and then I still had to cook my own fdt files and patch some weird stuff in kernel, keeping my own local branch, but yeah, it's always the same story with upstreaming, sadly. Been there, done that since OpenEZX days. But now, I just did the system update, rebooted and got 7.0.0-1 from the package manager, which is never than my x86 laptop. I still have trust issues with this, expecting it to not boot or get up without HDMI output zo.
hedora 6mo ago
On a related note: I pulled my pinebook pro out of a drawer this week, and spent an hour or so trying to figure out why the factory os couldn’t pull updates. I guess manjaro just abandoned arm entirely. The options are armbian (probably the pragmatic choice, but fsck systemd), or openbsd (no video acceleration because the drivers are gpl for some dumb reason). This sort of thing is less likely to happen to rpi, but it’s also getting pretty frustrating at this point.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6mo ago
  > I guess manjaro just abandoned arm entirely Er? https://manjaro.org/products/download/arm https://manjaro.org/products/download/arm explicitly lists the pinebook pro?
  - hedora 6mo ago
    None of the arm mirrors have recent updates. Maybe the LLM was wrong and manjaro completely broke the gpg chain (again), but it spent a long time following mirror links, checking timestamps and running internet searches, and I spent over an hour on manual debugging.
- Muromec 6mo ago
  Arch is pretty good on both arm and risc. Run my pis on it for years, including the orange one with rk3588
utopiah 6mo ago
> device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. Came looking for this. It's the pitfall of 99% of hardware projects. They get a great team of hardware engineer, they go through the maddening of actually producing a thing (which is crazy complex) at scale, economically viable (hopefully), logistic hurdles including tax worldwide, tariffs, etc... only to have only people on their team be able to build and run a Hello World example. To be fair even big player, e.g. NVIDIA, sucks at that too. Sure they have their GPU and CUDA but if you look at the "small" things like Jetson everybody I met told me the same thing, great hardware, unusable because the stack worked once when shipped then wasn't maintained.
- throwup238 6mo ago
  Welcome to the world of firmware. That’s why RaspberryPi won and pivoted to B2B compute module sales as they managed to leech broad community support for their chips and then turn around and sell it to industry who were tired of garbage BSPs. The reality for actual products is even worse. Qualcomm and Broadcom (even before the PE acquisition) are some of the worst companies to work with imaginable. I’ve had situations where we wasted a month tracking down a bug only for our Qualcomm account manager to admit that the bug was in a peripheral and in their errata already but couldn’t share the whole thing with us, among many other horror stories. I’d rather crawl through a mile of broken glass than have to deal with that again, so I have an extreme aversion to using anything but RPi, as distasteful as that is sometimes.
  - utopiah 6mo ago
    What's Qualcomm and Broadcom moat? Is it "just" IP or could they be replaced by a slower more expensive equivalent, say FPGA based, relying on open building blocks?
    - Yizahi 6mo ago
      The range of their offerings is immense and I think each product should be evaluated individually to competition. But just as an anecdote from my company - to create a full spectrum DOCSIS signal our HW team used multiple huge FPGA chips, I think it was Altera 10 or something (device is EOS by now) and that only for the DAC (kinda), there were separate CPU, separate 10G switch, separate utility FPGA, separate memory, separate everything. And it had to be glued together with some insane mash of code on top of the FPGA blobs which not always work as expected. All in all it was a ten unit monster which used something like 4000W in steady state and a dozen of industrial coolers at max to cool it off. And today that is replaced with a single relatively tiny in area chip (those old FPGAs were huge) from Broadcom, which does literally everything and complies with newest standard and uses tens of watts of power, and it is passively cooled. It's not quite the correct comparison since arch changed in the meantime, but if someone would build an exact replacement for that older big device using new chips and have the same specs, it would be half as big and use under 1000W or even less. And all software is ready to use without reinventing half of it manually. But yeah, Broadcom's support is slow and opaque. and they will stall any non-major customer for month for almost any request, because they are prioritizing different tasks internally. It's like a drug dealer dependency and there is only one dealer in your town :) .
danielheath 6mo ago
Every time there's a new discussion of some arm board, I compare the price / features / power use with the geekom n100 SBC I picked up awhile back. As far as I can tell, the OrangePi 6 remains distinctly uncompetitive with SBCs based on low-end intel chips. - Orange pi consumes much more power (despite being an arm CPU) - A bit faster on some benchmarks, a bit slower on others - Intel SBC is about 60% the price, and comes with case + storage - Intel SBC runs mainline linux and everything has working drivers
ValdikSS 6mo ago
>software support is fantastic. Unreliable USB: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3259 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3259 Unreliable Wi-Fi: * https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7092 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7092 * https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7111 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7111 * https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7272 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7272 I don't understand why many say that RPi software/firmware support is 'fantastic'. Maybe it used to be in the beginning compared to other chips and boards, but right now it's a bit above average: they ignore many things which is out of their control/can't debug and fix (as in Wi-Fi chip firmware).
- Orygin 6mo ago
  > I don't understand why many say that RPi software/firmware support is 'fantastic'. Because other vendors are way worse. Those tickets would not be "unreliable" but simply "broken" with a "Won't fix" status.
  - ValdikSS 6mo ago
    >Those tickets would not be "unreliable" but simply "broken" with a "Won't fix" status. Check the Wi-Fi tickets, they are sitting without any replies from the RPi team since 2025. It is broken in these configurations, I decided not to use this strong general term for this case (it's broken only in certain configurations and use cases). The USB bug (from 2019) has not be fully fixed. They got it much less extent, but did not eliminate the issue. >Because other vendors are way worse. There's only a single difference: Chinese vendors don't fix issues in both things they do control and in things they don't. The thing they control is usually a "Distro Build" or Buildroot rootfs hierarchy, which I personally see little value in. Bugs related to third-party hardware and firmware present on the board gets rarely fixed by both sides. Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not happy with it. I bought Intel NUC, which has Intel Ethernet and Intel Wi-Fi, as my PC with the idea that Intel has end-user support and writes drivers, and NUCs should come with golden Linux support, right? Yet Intel developers still supposed that I had to fix the bug in Intel drivers myself: https://marc.info/?l=linux-pci&m=175368780217953&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-pci&m=175368780217953&w=2
theshrike79 6mo ago
Good to know that the OrangePi software support is exactly at the same level it was during the first boards. There's a reason people just default to RaspberryPi even though better _hardware_ exists. RPi at least gets drivers and software support consistently.
edg5000 6mo ago
The main issue was that they forked UBoot and did not release their modifications, making it hard to run anything other than their Armbian fork. They forked Armbian a long time ago and kind of hacked things together rather than adding support for their HW to Armbian. After a while I gave up running anothing other than their releases, I had good experiences with the Orange Pi 3 and 5. But it's really uncool that they don't release their UBoot build! Lame! Their WiFi chip (Dragon something brand), had a bug where the WiFI beacon frames had incorrect element orderings, causing inconsistent results with some clients. Overall their Wifi was pure garbage. But apart from the Wifi it's robust stuff.
- Centrino 6mo ago
  I had good experiences with the Orange Pi 5 (only problem was soft reboot hanging), but only because Joshua Riek had created and maintained an Ubuntu distribution for the Rockchip. That project seems to be in limbo now, no kernel updates since at least a year.
apple4ever 6mo ago
> The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. This is the problem with every SBC that is not a Pi. I don't understand how they just ignore the software problem. I guess people keep buying them?

by BirAdam 6mo ago

daymanstep 6mo ago

Yeah that's the problem with ARM devices. Better just buy a N100

simlevesque 6mo ago
The N100 is way larger than a OrangePi 5 Max.
- geerlingguy 6mo ago
  Also about half as efficient, if that matters, and 1.5-2x higher idle power consumption (again, if that matters). Sometimes easier to acquire, but usually the same price or more expensive.
  - spockz 6mo ago
    I can run my N100 nuc at 4W wall socket power draw idle. If I keep turbo boost off, it also stays there under normal load up to 6W full power. Then it is also terribly slow. With turbo boost enabled power draw can go to 8-10W on full load. Not sure how this compares to the OrangePI in terms of performance per watt but it is already pretty far into the area of marginal gains for me at the cost of having to deal with ARM, custom housing, adapters to ensure the wall socket draw to be efficient etc. Having an efficient pico psu power a pi or orange pi is also not cheap.
    - daymanstep 6mo ago
      Which NUC do you have? A lot of the nameless brands on aliexpress draw 10 watts on idle.
      - Marsymars 6mo ago
        Not the poster you're replying to, but I run an Acer laptop with an N305 CPU as a Plex server. Idle power draw with the lid closed is 4-5W and I keep the battery capped at 80% charge.
        geerlingguy 6mo ago
        The N100/150/200/etc. can be clocked to use less power at idle (and capped for better thermals, especially in smaller or power-constrained devices). A lot of the cheaper mini PCs seem to let the chip go wild, and don't implement sleep/low power states correctly, which is why the range is so wide. I've seen N100 boards idle at 6W, and others idle at 10-12W.
      - spockz 6mo ago
        I have a minisforum. Boost enabled. WiFi disabled. No changes to P clock states or something from bios. Fedora. Applied all suggestions from powertop. I don’t recall changing anything else.
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
  - fulafel 6mo ago
    On the other hand RPi doesn't support suspend. So which wins depends if your application is always-on.
- blacksmith_tb 6mo ago
  There are quite a few x86-64 machines in the 70mm x 70mm form factor[1], which is close? 1: https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/Mini-PC/LIVA_Q2/ https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/Mini-PC/LIVA_Q2/
  - hebelehubele 6mo ago
    Lmao the hero background. They photoshopped the pc into the back pocket of that AI-generated woman. (or the entire thing is AI-generated)
    - blacksmith_tb 6mo ago
      I have an even cheesier competitor, which randomly has a dragon on the lid (it would be a terrible choice for all but the wimpiest casual gaming... but it makes a good Home Assistant HAOS server!)
    - 867-5309 6mo ago
      welcome to online shopping..
    - kowbell 6mo ago
      I dunno, I hear it‘s easy to put in your pocket and let the computer is everywhere
  - preisschild 6mo ago
    This only has 4 gb lpddr4 memory max, 1GbE and it seems no pcie lanes at all. The orange pi has much better specs.
- moffkalast 6mo ago
  Well... https://radxa.com/products/x/x4/ https://radxa.com/products/x/x4/ It has major overheating issues though, the N100 was never meant to be put on such a tiny PCB.
  - nine_k 6mo ago
    They also sell a heatsink for mere $21 (on AliExpress), just in case you don't know how to fit a spare PC cooler onto it.
    - moffkalast 6mo ago
      That's quite a lot for the very heatsink that still results in those overheating problems I mentioned. A standard CPU cooler will not be mountable on this in any reasonable way, that's like parking a truck on a lawn chair.
  - sunshine-o 6mo ago
    I recently tested a palmshell with a N100 from Radxa too [0] It performs well but there is definitely a thermal problem compared to other N100 based systems I got. - https://palmshell.io/slim-x4l https://palmshell.io/slim-x4l
- nl 6mo ago
  I have a Bosgame AG40 (low end Celeron N4020 - less powerful than the N100 - but runs fanless)[1]. It's 127 x 127 x 508 mm. I think most mini N100 PCs are around that size. The OrangePi 5 Max board is 89x57mm (it says 1.6mm "thickness" on the spec sheet but I think that is a typo - the ethernet port is more than that) Add a few mm for a case and it's roughly 2/3 as long and half the width of the A40. [1] https://manuals.plus/asin/B0DG8P4DGV https://manuals.plus/asin/B0DG8P4DGV
- nijave 6mo ago
  My Ace Magician N100 is 190x115mm Big by comparison, but still pretty small
- bawana 6mo ago
  Zimaboard2 has n150 and is smaller
severino 6mo ago
I thought N100 equivalent SBC computers like Radxa's, etc., were largely out of stock for quite some time now.
Gigachad 6mo ago
I gave up on them and switched to a second hand mini pc. These mini desktops are offloaded in bulk by governments and offices for cheap and have much better specs than the same priced SBC. And you are no longer limited to “raspberry pi” builds of distros. Unless you strictly need the tiny form factor of an SBC you are so much better going with x86.
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  The mobility+power has been a thing for me. I can pick it up and take it outside with a USB battery pack and it just works.
ekianjo 6mo ago
The N100 is more expensive, does not come with onboard wifi, and requires active cooling.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  Once you get a case, power supply, and some usable diskspace is the n100 isn't that much more expensive.
  - ekianjo 6mo ago
    active cooling is the killer though. I'd prefer a board that is fanless any day.
    - nomel 6mo ago
      The Orange Pi 6 Plus has a fan.
    - mixmastamyk 6mo ago
      My N200 tablet (Starlite) has no fan that I know of. Not exactly the same but number implies it should be more powerful.
    - PhilipRoman 6mo ago
      N100 works just fine with fully passive cooling

kombine 6mo ago

I was planning to build a NAS from OPi 5 to minimise power consumption, but ended up going for a Zen 3 Ryzen CPU and having zero regrets. The savings are miniscule and would not justify the costs.

Aurornis 6mo ago

> The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. I think everyone considering an SBC should be warned that none of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be. Even the Raspberry Pi 5, one of the most well supported of the SBCs, is still getting trickles of mainline support. The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing.

cptskippy 6mo ago
> The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, Were people actually doing that?
- unethical_ban 6mo ago
  They probably define general purpose as anything homelab based that runs on a commodity OS.
- hnuser123456 6mo ago
  More like people try doing anything other than use the base OS, and realize the bottom-tier x86 mini-PCs are 3-4x faster for the same price, and can encode a basic video stream without bogging down. If the RPI came with any recent mid-tier Snapdragon SOC, it might be interesting. Or if someone made a Linux distro that supports all devices on one of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops, that would be interesting. Instead, it's more like the equivalent of a cheap desktop with integrated GPU from 20 years ago, on a single board, with decent linux support, and GPIO. So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between.
  - charcircuit 6mo ago
    Bottom tier computers were more than $25.
    - 6mo ago

notRobot 6mo ago

Have you taken a look at armbian? If so, what was your experience? https://www.armbian.com/boards?vendor=xunlong https://www.armbian.com/boards?vendor=xunlong

BirAdam 6mo ago
I have. It’s great on the RPi. On OPi5max, it didn’t support the hardware. Worse, if you flash it to UEFI you’ll lose compat with the one system that did support it (older versions of BredOS). For that, you grab an old release, and never update. If you’re running something simple that you know won’t benefit from any update at all, that’s great. An RK3588 is a decent piece of kit though, and it really deserves better.

pantalaimon 6mo ago

I thought RK3588 had pretty good mainline support, what's the issue with this board?

BirAdam 6mo ago
Video, networking, etc. To get working 3588 you’d have to go with a passionate group like MNT, and then you’re paying way more.
cyberrock 6mo ago
Hardware video decoding support for h264 and av1 just landed in 7.0 so it hasn't been a great bleeding edge experience for desktop and Plex etc users. But IMO late support is still support.
ThatPlayer 6mo ago
I've got this bookmarked for tracking: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35... Not on this list is the current GPU Vulkan drivers Collabora are working on too. Don't think that's really blame Rockchip since they're ARM Mali-G610 GPUs, but yeah those didn't get stable in Mesa until last year.
- Muromec 6mo ago
  Current vetsion of vulkan panfrost notably doesn't run zed. Not just some games, a text editor doesn not get some surface extensions
imoverclocked 6mo ago
Yes, and no. I have an OrangePi 5 Ultra and I'm finally running a vanilla kernel on it. Don't bother trying anything before kernel 6.18.x -- unless you are willing to stick with their 6.1.x kernel with a million+ line diff. The u-boot environment that comes with the board is hacked up. eg: It supports an undocumented amount of extlinux.conf ... just enough that whatever Debian writes by default, breaks it. Luckily, the u-boot project does support the board and I was able to flash a newer u-boot to the boot media and then the onboard flash [1]. Now the hdmi port doesn't show anything and I use a couple of serial pins when I need to do anything before it's on-net. -- I purchased a Rock 5T (also rk3588) and the story is similar ... but upstream support for the board is much worse. Doing a diff between device trees [2] (supplied via custom Debian image vs vanilla kernel) tells me a lot. eg: there are addresses that are different between the two. Upstream u-boot doesn't have support for the board explicitly. No display, serial console doesn't work after boot. I just wanted this board for its dual 2.5Gb ethernet ports but the ports even seem buggy. It might be an issue with my ISP... they seem to think otherwise. -- Not being able to run a vanilla kernel/u-boot is a deal-breaker for me. If I can't upgrade my kernel to deal with a vulnerability without the company existing/supporting my particular board, I'm not comfortable using it. IMHO, these boards exist in a space somewhere between the old-embedded world (where just having a working image is enough) and the modern linux world (where one needs to be able to update/apply patches) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OrangePI/comments/1l6hnqk/comment/nlw3qvn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OrangePI/comments/1l6hnqk/comment/n... [2] https://gist.github.com/imoverclocked/1354ef79bd24318b8855277e909a404d https://gist.github.com/imoverclocked/1354ef79bd24318b885527...

Havoc 6mo ago

>The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. It's pretty hacky for sure but wouldn't classify it as useless. e.g. I managed to get some LLMs to run on the NPU of an Orange pi 5 a while back I see there is now even a NPU compatible llama.cpp fork though haven't tried it

ugh123 6mo ago

What specifically is lacking?

Muromec 6mo ago
Hdmi output on the vanilla kernel started to work thus year. Hdmi in still doesnt. Zed doesn not start bc of some missing vulkan extensions
- mort96 6mo ago
  Oh they finally got that up and running? That's good, but extremely late. It released in 2021. That's half a decade. As long as running an upstream kernel means you have to use 5+ year old SoCs, running upstream Linux instead of a vendor kernel remains completely out of the question for most circumstances.
  - Muromec 6mo ago
    I used to run some weird 5.x kernel until I found about collabora and then I still had to cook my own fdt files and patch some weird stuff in kernel, keeping my own local branch, but yeah, it's always the same story with upstreaming, sadly. Been there, done that since OpenEZX days. But now, I just did the system update, rebooted and got 7.0.0-1 from the package manager, which is never than my x86 laptop. I still have trust issues with this, expecting it to not boot or get up without HDMI output zo.

hedora 6mo ago

On a related note: I pulled my pinebook pro out of a drawer this week, and spent an hour or so trying to figure out why the factory os couldn’t pull updates. I guess manjaro just abandoned arm entirely. The options are armbian (probably the pragmatic choice, but fsck systemd), or openbsd (no video acceleration because the drivers are gpl for some dumb reason). This sort of thing is less likely to happen to rpi, but it’s also getting pretty frustrating at this point.

yjftsjthsd-h 6mo ago
> I guess manjaro just abandoned arm entirely Er? https://manjaro.org/products/download/arm https://manjaro.org/products/download/arm explicitly lists the pinebook pro?
- hedora 6mo ago
  None of the arm mirrors have recent updates. Maybe the LLM was wrong and manjaro completely broke the gpg chain (again), but it spent a long time following mirror links, checking timestamps and running internet searches, and I spent over an hour on manual debugging.
Muromec 6mo ago
Arch is pretty good on both arm and risc. Run my pis on it for years, including the orange one with rk3588

utopiah 6mo ago

> device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. Came looking for this. It's the pitfall of 99% of hardware projects. They get a great team of hardware engineer, they go through the maddening of actually producing a thing (which is crazy complex) at scale, economically viable (hopefully), logistic hurdles including tax worldwide, tariffs, etc... only to have only people on their team be able to build and run a Hello World example. To be fair even big player, e.g. NVIDIA, sucks at that too. Sure they have their GPU and CUDA but if you look at the "small" things like Jetson everybody I met told me the same thing, great hardware, unusable because the stack worked once when shipped then wasn't maintained.

throwup238 6mo ago
Welcome to the world of firmware. That’s why RaspberryPi won and pivoted to B2B compute module sales as they managed to leech broad community support for their chips and then turn around and sell it to industry who were tired of garbage BSPs. The reality for actual products is even worse. Qualcomm and Broadcom (even before the PE acquisition) are some of the worst companies to work with imaginable. I’ve had situations where we wasted a month tracking down a bug only for our Qualcomm account manager to admit that the bug was in a peripheral and in their errata already but couldn’t share the whole thing with us, among many other horror stories. I’d rather crawl through a mile of broken glass than have to deal with that again, so I have an extreme aversion to using anything but RPi, as distasteful as that is sometimes.
- utopiah 6mo ago
  What's Qualcomm and Broadcom moat? Is it "just" IP or could they be replaced by a slower more expensive equivalent, say FPGA based, relying on open building blocks?
  - Yizahi 6mo ago
    The range of their offerings is immense and I think each product should be evaluated individually to competition. But just as an anecdote from my company - to create a full spectrum DOCSIS signal our HW team used multiple huge FPGA chips, I think it was Altera 10 or something (device is EOS by now) and that only for the DAC (kinda), there were separate CPU, separate 10G switch, separate utility FPGA, separate memory, separate everything. And it had to be glued together with some insane mash of code on top of the FPGA blobs which not always work as expected. All in all it was a ten unit monster which used something like 4000W in steady state and a dozen of industrial coolers at max to cool it off. And today that is replaced with a single relatively tiny in area chip (those old FPGAs were huge) from Broadcom, which does literally everything and complies with newest standard and uses tens of watts of power, and it is passively cooled. It's not quite the correct comparison since arch changed in the meantime, but if someone would build an exact replacement for that older big device using new chips and have the same specs, it would be half as big and use under 1000W or even less. And all software is ready to use without reinventing half of it manually. But yeah, Broadcom's support is slow and opaque. and they will stall any non-major customer for month for almost any request, because they are prioritizing different tasks internally. It's like a drug dealer dependency and there is only one dealer in your town :) .

danielheath 6mo ago

Every time there's a new discussion of some arm board, I compare the price / features / power use with the geekom n100 SBC I picked up awhile back. As far as I can tell, the OrangePi 6 remains distinctly uncompetitive with SBCs based on low-end intel chips. - Orange pi consumes much more power (despite being an arm CPU) - A bit faster on some benchmarks, a bit slower on others - Intel SBC is about 60% the price, and comes with case + storage - Intel SBC runs mainline linux and everything has working drivers

ValdikSS 6mo ago

>software support is fantastic. Unreliable USB: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3259 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3259 Unreliable Wi-Fi: * https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7092 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7092 * https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7111 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7111 * https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7272 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/7272 I don't understand why many say that RPi software/firmware support is 'fantastic'. Maybe it used to be in the beginning compared to other chips and boards, but right now it's a bit above average: they ignore many things which is out of their control/can't debug and fix (as in Wi-Fi chip firmware).

Orygin 6mo ago
> I don't understand why many say that RPi software/firmware support is 'fantastic'. Because other vendors are way worse. Those tickets would not be "unreliable" but simply "broken" with a "Won't fix" status.
- ValdikSS 6mo ago
  >Those tickets would not be "unreliable" but simply "broken" with a "Won't fix" status. Check the Wi-Fi tickets, they are sitting without any replies from the RPi team since 2025. It is broken in these configurations, I decided not to use this strong general term for this case (it's broken only in certain configurations and use cases). The USB bug (from 2019) has not be fully fixed. They got it much less extent, but did not eliminate the issue. >Because other vendors are way worse. There's only a single difference: Chinese vendors don't fix issues in both things they do control and in things they don't. The thing they control is usually a "Distro Build" or Buildroot rootfs hierarchy, which I personally see little value in. Bugs related to third-party hardware and firmware present on the board gets rarely fixed by both sides. Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not happy with it. I bought Intel NUC, which has Intel Ethernet and Intel Wi-Fi, as my PC with the idea that Intel has end-user support and writes drivers, and NUCs should come with golden Linux support, right? Yet Intel developers still supposed that I had to fix the bug in Intel drivers myself: https://marc.info/?l=linux-pci&m=175368780217953&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-pci&m=175368780217953&w=2

theshrike79 6mo ago

Good to know that the OrangePi software support is exactly at the same level it was during the first boards. There's a reason people just default to RaspberryPi even though better _hardware_ exists. RPi at least gets drivers and software support consistently.

edg5000 6mo ago

The main issue was that they forked UBoot and did not release their modifications, making it hard to run anything other than their Armbian fork. They forked Armbian a long time ago and kind of hacked things together rather than adding support for their HW to Armbian. After a while I gave up running anothing other than their releases, I had good experiences with the Orange Pi 3 and 5. But it's really uncool that they don't release their UBoot build! Lame! Their WiFi chip (Dragon something brand), had a bug where the WiFI beacon frames had incorrect element orderings, causing inconsistent results with some clients. Overall their Wifi was pure garbage. But apart from the Wifi it's robust stuff.

Centrino 6mo ago
I had good experiences with the Orange Pi 5 (only problem was soft reboot hanging), but only because Joshua Riek had created and maintained an Ubuntu distribution for the Rockchip. That project seems to be in limbo now, no kernel updates since at least a year.

apple4ever 6mo ago

> The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. This is the problem with every SBC that is not a Pi. I don't understand how they just ignore the software problem. I guess people keep buying them?