[tbrock]

You could do this for cheaper (and with more ram) using a raspberry pi 4 with a usb nvme ssd, it’s got gigabit ethernet and is arm64. Sure you have two less cores than this solution but it’s more likely to be supported over time and once you get the SD card out of the mix the I/O is solid. I’ve been surprised by how much the SD card throughput was limiting the experience.

I run arch Linux arm on mine and it’s a fantastic little device. I wonder if these boards are way faster or just more of the same. I guess the pcie expansion makes this more extensible.

[detrites]

> "Looking at the available offerings [...]"

The slight problem with the deservedly often-recommended RP4 is that for most people it's so hard to come by it effectively doesn't exist.

[johnklos]

> cheaper

No, you can't, unless you know of some source of retail priced Raspberry Pi 4s.

In some basic tests (compiling, ffmpeg), the Pi 4 and the Rock Pro 64 are within a small percentage of difference in performance.

[sliken]

Indeed, but the much nicer/faster/better PCIe and faster CPUs in the RK3588 for another $25, with the option to get double the ram of the top RPi 4.

[megous]

RK3399 is completely FOSS, from bootloader, to firmware, to Linux drivers and mainlined. It will be supported as long as someone wants to run software on it.

[jamesy0ung]

Raspberry Pi, despite not being fully FOSS, has a much better community supporting it. I’d bet it will last longer than the pine boards. Watched Jeff Geerling’s videos on it and he had trouble getting the pine board to work, whereas the Raspberry Pi worked first try. The only images for it were some images a guy made and put on the pine wiki.

[oynqr]

That's the great thing about mainline support, you ignore random trashy images and use generic distro ones.

[Tepix]

Any SSD will do really since it'll be bottlenecked by 5GBit/s USB.