Comment by avhception
7 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.
I don’t hear people suggesting to replace an RPi with a similar device (OrangePi or what not).
What I hear a _lot_ is that the thing could have been an esp32 (or Arduino rarely).
That’s a way wider price gap. I can order Costco-sized lots of esp32’s for the price of a single RPi.
RPis pricing has really, really narrowed the space where their products make sense. Low power devices can be esp32, high power can be x86 NUC things (or interconnected esp32s if you need tons of pins).
I don’t encounter a ton of things in “too big for an esp32 but I’m positive I don’t even want the option of a beefier x86 CPU”.
No hate if it works for you. I don’t even dislike RPi, they’re just in a narrower band for me these days.
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.