Thanks you all for the work you do. I'm running Armbian on several SBCs (including this Odroid N2 I'm posting from). Orange Pi One, RockPro64, other Odroids including XU4.
But not on my R.Pi boards. I'd like to, but can't. ( 1 original model, 2 x old M2 and 2 x old M3). Why do I have the R. Pi? Why do they sell so well? Because they are a cheap and easy entry point with lots of defined projects for learning / getting started. I started with just the original Pi. It was pretty much useless, but was fun to play with. It is still in use as a DNS server and Squid Proxy as is one of the M2 boards. The M3 made it "almost usable" as a daily driver desktop (modulo video being semi-useless in most builds - but one of them is running Kodi and doing fine). Then I "moved on" to better boards. I'll not be buying an M4 as they continue the hobbled I/O and complete lack of attention to heat removal means it heat throttles at idle. IMHO a very poor design choice with hot A72 cores and no heat extraction.
But I'd have never started using SBCs nor 'branched out' to the other better boards had I not been able to "give it a try" on a well supplied and easy to bring up starter. A "toy", but one that did the job of educating me on SBCs. (Prior experience was from Vaxen to Crays and points in between and including Intel / AMD Linux & BSD boxes).
So why do they sell so well? Easy. You can get LOADS of software and advice pages for them. Projects that have had many eyeballs find and fix the mistakes. Almost everyone has something for them. For my 'lesser boards' the OS choices are very limited (in some cases you get a choice of one, often Ubuntu). You can pretty much buy one knowing you can get it to work and have help if needed from 'the neighbor' or their kid who has some also. Market Share matters to the size of the "ecosystem" that rises round it. Minor low sales boards just wither away and then even the vendor stops any OS updates on their one mediocre port. Many SBCs have a timer on them once you buy them, and the software death comes in about 5 years (sometimes less it seems).
One other reason: Say you want to remove Chinese SOCs from your network. What are your choices? 1) VERY expensive in the $hundred range. 2) Korean - Odroid in particular or 3) Raspberry Pi / Broadcom. (There's a few others, but not common). Allwinner and Rockchip are in almost ALL the other widely available and inexpensive boards.
So is China <i>safe</i> as a provider? At one contract where I was doing pen-testing, we got a shipment of USB drives to hand out as marketing trinkets. 10% tested as pre-infected with a virus (and were sent back to China...). If the CCP influenced companies are willing to use $4 USB drives to create back doors, why would they not do it to the much more capable SOCs? There's a VERY long list of CCP "buggery" of devices (including 'picture frames' that display changing photos) and systems. So, for me, my Chinese chipped systems go in an isolated network from everything else. Only the Korean and US chips go on the "good" side.
FWIW, I sing your praises to everyone on my blog. I don't expect you to make a R.Pi port, even though I'd like one. "Someday" when I have time, I may well take it on myself. (I've assembled a 'frankensystem' or two in my time, with Armbian kernel, boot etc. and Devuan userland, for example). But I can't justify asking you to do what I've not bothered to try myself. I really like how you have managed to "fix" some of the annoying behaviours of the early SystemD rollout. Like eth0 being changed and how an entry for a missing disk in /etc/fstab could cause a black screen that looked like dead board on booting. What I like about Armbian is that it "just works right" and I don't have to go chasing down rabbit holes... (For example, just installed a Debian Buster on one Pi M3 and it boots, goes to an LXDE desktop, then just hangs after a few minutes. Apparently QA is sparse...)
I'll use what's available on the Pi SBCs and keep them in service until they eventually die, running 'whatever' flavor of Linux. But Armbian goes on most of the rest. Thanks for that.
