zlacker

>>ekianj+(OP)
The review shows ARM64 software support is still painful vs x86. For $200 for the 16gb model, this is the price point where you could just get an Intel N150 mini PC in the same form factor. And those usually come with cases. They also tend to pull 5-8w at idle, while this is 15w. Cool if you really want ARM64, but at this end of the performance spectrum, why not stick with the x86 stack where everything just works a lot easier?

>>eleven+O7
From the article: "[...] the Linux support for various parts of the boards, not being upstreamed and mainlined, is very likely to be stuck on an older version. This is usually what causes headaches down the road [...]".

The problem isn't support for the ARM architecture in general, it's the support for this particular board.

Other boards like the Raspberry Pi and many boards based on Rockchip SoCs have most of the necessary support mainlined, so the experience is quite painless. Many are starting to get support for UEFI as well.

>>Youden+td
The exception (even those are questionable as running plain Debian did not work right on Pi 3B and others when I tried recently) proves the rule. You have to look really hard to find an x86 computer where things don't just basically work, the reverse is true for ARM. The power draw between the two is comparable these days, so I don't understand why anyone would bother with ARM when you've got something where you need more than minimally powerful hardware.

>>rpcope+dF
The Pi 3B doesn't have UEFI support, so it requires special support on the distro side for the boot process but for the 4 and newer you can flash (or it'll already be there, depending on luck and age of the device) the firmware on the board to support UEFI and USB boot, though installing is a bit of a pain since there's no easy images to do it with. https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi4

I believe some other distros also have UEFI booting/installers setup for PI4 and newer devices because of this, though there's a good chance you'll want some of the other libraries that come with Raspberry PI OS (aka Raspbian) still for some of the hardware specific features like CSI/DSI and some of the GPIO features that might not be fully upstreamed yet.

There's also a port of Proxmox called PXVirt (Formerly Proxmox Port) that exists to use a number of similar ARM systems now as a virtualization host with a nice ui and automation around it.