They might be good performance wise, but if you watch the Jeff Geerling video he mentions in the post, it will show you how much trouble he has with it. Custom distros with broken repos, non mainlined outdated kernels.
Having owned many raspberry pis, a handful of rock pis (4A, 4B, Zero and S), Mango Pis, Khadas VIM4 and other SBCs (I have a problem haha)... I can say without a doubt the two shining stars the Raspberry Pi has are their distro/software and general ecosystem.
Just upgrading and dealing with downloading/upgrading the Raspberry Pi is a dream compared to the Rock Pis. The Khadas is a little better, but still I have a hard time upgrading it and sometimes certain images just won't even work from the company. Sometimes when trying to upgrade Rock Pis with eMMC you will find 2 or three different ways to install the freaking image on their own wikis.
There's also the "security" aspect for me, I really don't trust some of these distros (maybe I shouldn't worry??). A random image someone put on their website with broken instructions and messed up repos/kernels doesn't exactly instill confidence to me.
I will say the one GREAT thing from Rock Pi is their rock pi x. But it has an x86 processor and I can just install any distro. I wish they were easier to purchase and had more memory!!!
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend one that doesn't have mainline kernels. But Pine64 does good work on getting stuff upstreamed. The RK3399 used in the PinePhone Pro, the Orange Pi 4, Rock 4, and other boards has proper mainline support. I'm also a fan of the open sourced GPU drivers for that SoC done by the panfrost team that has desktop OpenGL support (not just the ES stuff).
Especially when dealing with low-level hardware stuff, like SPI and PWM and other pin I/O, design can be much easier when sticking to Raspberries only, because there are inevitably a lot of quirks that are different between companies.
Yup, can confirm. Was trying to setup an Octoprint machine for my 3d printer, none of Raspberry Pi’s were in stock. After trying to catch one for weeks, I ended up buying the second-newest revision of OrangePi that was pretty powerful (not the barebones version).
To say it was trouble would be an understatement. Even after I successfully completed the setup (which took forever, as the documentation was contradicting, confusing, and felt like it was worse than machine-translated to english). Stability wasn’t there either at all. Occasionally it would just lock up and freeze, requiring a hard reboot. It would heat up pretty bad sometimes, despite an extra heat dissipator/cooler (that i triply made sure was installed properly). Webcam would randomly just refuse working (and I had to manually edit linux configs to get it to work in the first place). Sometimes SSH connection would just die and I become unable to connect to it again without either a reboot or restarting networking services on it (which would require me physically being next to it, thus defeating the point of Octoprint being remote). And mind you, I didn’t run it as some heavy production-tier 3d printing controller, I would print something a couple times a week tops, and nothing too complex or too high res (in terms of the model being printed).
All while Raspberry Pi has great documentation, and Octoprint setup on it is pretty much plug and play with just a few clicks of installing dependencies (or even simpler than that, if you install a dedicated Octoprint distro made specifically for Raspberry Pi).
Custom and outdated distros is a big problem with ARM boards unfortunately, unless you are a big and popular player like the Raspberry Pi. But even then a lot is not supported in mainline
That's my experience with many alternatives, basically nothing (INCLUDING rPi) is just supported in mainline, but rPi's patched version of Debian is well supported unlike the alternatives.
If just for playing around paying extra for pi just to have something that works makes a lot of sense.
Just upgrading and dealing with downloading/upgrading the Raspberry Pi is a dream compared to the Rock Pis. The Khadas is a little better, but still I have a hard time upgrading it and sometimes certain images just won't even work from the company. Sometimes when trying to upgrade Rock Pis with eMMC you will find 2 or three different ways to install the freaking image on their own wikis.
There's also the "security" aspect for me, I really don't trust some of these distros (maybe I shouldn't worry??). A random image someone put on their website with broken instructions and messed up repos/kernels doesn't exactly instill confidence to me.
I will say the one GREAT thing from Rock Pi is their rock pi x. But it has an x86 processor and I can just install any distro. I wish they were easier to purchase and had more memory!!!