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by akoster
3422 days ago
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Thanks for your post (and tl;dr comment too - I need to work on being more concise :-). I own no Quark powered boards but have some friends who do. It's a shame that they fall into the category of boards with poor software support (and even more of a shame since they are based off the Intel architecture). I own a few raspberry pi's and have been extremely pleased that even my rPi model B+ from 2012 still gets support and updates (and hopefully will for a while longer now that the rPi zero exists with similar hardware). Friends would brag about the faster or cheaper O-droid, Pine-64 or Banana-pi, but with dismal software support, I couldn't justify even a descent performance boost. This reminds me of the little I know of the Android ecosystem, where a tablet I bought in 2013 is still stuck on Jelly Bean, while my 2012 iPhone 5 still gets updates. I wish there was some sort of regulatory label put on these devices (or boards) that would clearly state how many years of support they would commit to. |
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As someone who owns a Raspberry Pi, PandaBoard, BananaPi, Orange Pi, and Intel DK200 I've learned this important life lesson:
Always assume that the most support you'll ever receive for the board is on the day you buy it.
Apart from the Raspberry Pi, no one else gives half a shit to fix bugs or even provide distro updates for their hardware.
Cheap Chinese boards are even worse for this. They'll typically take the SoC kernel (an ancient version several years out of date with the worst patches you've ever seen) and roll some shitty old distro around it (e.g. Ubuntu 14.04, Android 4.4).
A good recommendation for people looking to buy a board is to look at the Armbian [0] or Arch Linux ARM [1] supported hardware (read the notices!!!) and buy that.
[0] http://armbian.com
[1] https://archlinuxarm.org/