[ajsnigrutin]

Sadly, yes.

You can buy whatever else you want, even cheaper and better today, and after three years, getting a modern supported OS will be a total pain, due to binary blobs, custom drivers, custom "design solutions" etc.

RaspberryPi is currently the only SBC where you can take any revision of it and still get fully working(! yes, even wifi, bluetooth, etc.) software for it, even if it's not the newest and the greatest model.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

It's my understanding that https://www.armbian.com/ has quite broad hardware support, and there are boards from Orange Pi and Pine64 that boast actual mainline kernel support, so this is more a case of a fragmented ecosystem than there being zero competitors that can meet or exceed pis.

[_cenw]

x86 based SBCs being the notable exception, since you're very likely going to get an Intel CPU that's in the lineage to Atom (and now E-Cores)

[MrBuddyCasino]

The first gen Pi Zero W isn't really supported anymore due to the outdated ISA. But other than that, you're right.

[megous]

This is just nonsense. There are plenty of old (6-7 year old boards) very well supported in Linux. I've been using several such boards for that long.

If anything, support gets better with time, usually.

[LeafItAlone]

Which SBCs are you referring to?

[megous]

Many of these https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/arch/arm64/bo... or these https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/arch/arm64/bo... or these https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.6-rc7/source/arch/arm/bo...

SoC support for Rockchip/Allwinner is usually good, except for the newest SoC, where the support may be lacking in some aspects that may or may not matter to whatever usecase at hand.

Checking the board DT before buying is a good idea, to see what's supported.

I have about 8 differnt Orange/Xunlong and Pine64 SBCs, running for between 7-3 years with continuous mainline Linux updates.