[esskay]

Thing is once you start looking outside of the base model it becomes a bit less of a good offering when there are others making compatible boards that are arguably better specced.

The only issue of course is some whilst sharing the same formfactor and connector aren't always compatible with the same hardware.

If I recall correctly the Radxa CM3's for example are fully compatible.

[benj111]

Rpis proposition has always been support rather than value per se.

If you want cheaper, yes there are other options. If you want something where a mainline kernel will work, and has a community, Pis are a much better choice.

[HankB99]

> where a mainline kernel will work

For some definition of a "mainline kernel." My preferred Linux distro is Debian, I still can't run a Pi 5 on Debian over a year following release. (I don't know if this is for lack of Pi engineers not pushing stuff upstream or Debian/kernel devs not being receptive to PRs, but I suppose the answer is somewhere in between.)

I do run Debian on Pi 4B/CM4 and others. At present I'm working on getting 1-wire with a DS18B20 working on a Pi Zero W and it has not been easy, but that might be me.

I was truly excited to see the CM4 released because it provided a PCIe slot and which can support a proper storage interface on a Pi. I don't see a compelling feature on the CM5 so I'm not going to jump on one just yet. I'll probably get one at some point.

I do agree that the Raspberry Pi community provides reasonable support. I have, however, found the Reddit community occasionally toxic and have had questions on the official Pi forum removed w/out explanation. (I asked why the Imager did not offer the most recent OS releases in the menu, requiring that I manually download them.)

[bayindirh]

> For some definition of a "mainline kernel."

...but I bet you can port Raspberry's patches to a vanilla kernel tree relatively easily. Good luck with it with other providers.

I used OrangePi and Radxa. Radxa rock was a huge disappointment in that regard.

[trissi1996]

The last time i tried to get pi running with a distro that wasn't raspbian it was huge PITA, with having to use custom kernel patches and weird proprietary firmware and annoying boot process, am I misremebering or did this change ?

On any x86 UEFI system I tried i never had any issues at all, but Pi's I remember as a huge PITA...

Or is this just a general ARM issue ?

[HankB99]

> Or is this just a general ARM issue ?

I understand that this is the case. IBM did the PC world a solid by not encumbering the original H/W. That provided a basis for a platform that could be copied and provide a "standard" that others could leverage, including copying and reverse engineering the BIOS that launched the OS. That provided the foundation of the PC explosion. They tried to reverse their "mistake" with the Microchannel Architecture and that saw limited success (AKA failed.)

IBM was also part of a consortium that tried to develop a common platform for the Power architecture. I'm not sure if any of that survives in their current offerings but it did not take anything away from the Intel (Windows) market and except for Apple, the Power PC was nowhere to be seen.

ARM processors have proliferated in the hand held (phone, tablet) market where volumes are sufficient for the manufacturers to provide their own solution to bootstrapping the OS. There are some efforts to agree on a common boot architecture (Yocto, UEFI and probably others) and I'm not familiar with them, but I hope one succeeds so we can easily load a variety of OSs on our devices.

Incidentally... The GPU in the Raspberry Pi performs the initial stages of the boot process. Weird. I think that Pi 4/5 generations are moving away from that but I'm not familiar with the detains. As near as I can tell, they've preserved the S/W structure required for the GPU to perform this function.

[bayindirh]

My OrangePi 5B runs circles around an Raspberry Pi 5 (cooler, 2x cores, 2x RAM f you want, a decent eMMC, AI acceleration plus better hardware video encoders, etc.).

However, the support is "barely there". It's running standard Debian stable with a pinned Kernel from OrangePi guys, and the Kernel tree is open, but I don't know whether I'll be able to compile a 6.x kernel by lifting their patches and correctly applying them to a mainline kernel.

Then I don't know which drivers are closed source and how they'll play with each other.

On the other hand, Raspian works really well. Plus with a good A2 card, you really don't feel any latency in day to day use of the system anymore.

P.S.: I run both of them as home servers at different locations, so I can "continuously review" them day to day.