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
My uninformed normie view of the ecosystem suggests that it's the support for almost every particular board, and that's exactly the issue. For some reason, ARM devices always have some custom OS or Android and can't run off-the-shelf Linux. Meanwhile you can just buy an x86/amd64 device and assume it will just work. I presume there is some fundamental reason why ARM devices are so bad about this? Like they're just missing standardization and every device requires some custom firmware to be loaded by the OS that's inevitably always packaged in a hacky way?

>>ndrisc+qi
This has often been the case in the past but the situation is much improved now.

For example I have an Orange Pi 5 Plus running the totally generic aarch64 image of Home Assistant OS [0]. Zero customization was needed, it just works with mainline everything.

There's even UEFI [1].

Granted this isn't the case for all boards but Rockchip at least seems to have great upstream support.

[0]: https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases

[1]: https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588

>>Youden+Mr
Yeah but you can get a n100 on sale for about the same price, and it comes with a case, nvme storage (way better then sd card), power supply, proper cooling solution, and less maintanance…

>>shadow+Sf1
The Orange Pi 5 Plus on its own should be much cheaper than an N100 system. Only when you add in those extras does the price even out. I bought mine in an overpriced bundle for 182€ a few months ago.

It supports NVMe SSDs same as an N100.

Maintenance is exactly the same; they both run mainline Linux.

Where the N100 perhaps wins is in performance.

Where the Orange Pi 5 Plus (and other RK3588-based boards) wins is in power usage, especially for always-on, low-utilization applications.

>>Youden+2M2
You can get an n100 system for $110 on sale. Price went up but I still see $135 on eBay now. However YMMV because Europe prices are different

For power I don’t know about orange pi 5 but for many SBC power was a mixed bag. I had pretty bad luck with random SBC taking way more power for random reasons and not putting devices in idle mode. Even raspberry pi was pretty bad when it launched.

It’s frustrating because it’s hard to fix. With x64 you can often go into bios and enable power modes, but that’s not the case with arm. For example pcie4 can easily draw 2w+ when active. (The interface!)

See for example here:

https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/issues/606

My n100 takes 6W and 8w (8 and 16gb). If pi5 takes 3w that’s not large enough to matter especially when it’s so inconsistent.

Now one place where I used to like rpi zero was gpio access. However I’m transitioning to rp2350 as it’s just better suited for that kind of work, easier to find and cheaper.