Comment by avhception
4 hours ago
Even rather mainstream stuff like the RPi can get wonky in places, and still people comment on why "idiots" buy RPis when this-or-that ARM board has 10% more bang for the buck. Eh, yeah, of course. I'd love to only ever run RandomShenzenCorp's heavily patched vendor kernel from 2016.
RockChip stuff tends to have good support, and in fact I'd trust it more to have good support than Raspberry Pi (Broadcom). When in doubt, check or wait before buying in any case. In many cases support will not meaningfully improve from how it was at release (learned this one the hard way) and most ARM devices are e-waste. Try not to get excited about theoretical hardware specs either, they might as well be fake because of how poorly the majority of ARM stuff actually works. Go for known good software support and then upgrade to new hardware when you find something newer with known good software support a few years later.
Just in case anyone unfamiliar reads this, the way to run ARM boards is e.g. https://armbian.com/ (or NetBSD, Debian, whatever you prefer) and never the vendor junk.
RasPi just enshittified, pushing out a firmware upgrade that bricks the Pi if it detects you've upgraded the RAM yourself.