Dear Igor,
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my concerns. I carefully read your comments and deeply appreciate the contributions made by the Armbian community to the SBC ecosystem. Below are my responses and clarifications regarding the points you raised:
About Community-Supported Images,You mentioned that "these are community-supported images—they may work or may not. Nobody will debug them but you." I fully understand the limitations of community-supported versions and recognize that the development team's primary focus is on the official supported versions. When using community-supported images, I did not expect direct support but will follow your advice and try further testing while providing logs to assist in locating the issue.
About the New Kernel and Related Work, You mentioned that the team invested significant time and effort in developing the Linux 6.12 kernel build and that others have not for it. I truly appreciate the work that the Armbian team has put into this. Open-source contributions are challenging, and I recognize the immense value in the hard work that has been done. I believe that Armbian's influence in the SBC ecosystem is irreplaceable, and I am thankful for your team's efforts.
About Community Donations and Maintenance,You suggested that "here you can make a donation" and "if you wish, you can step up as a maintainer." I appreciate this sincere invitation. While I am currently unable to take on the role of a maintainer, I am willing to contribute by providing feedback, testing information, and participating in community discussions. I will also consider supporting Armbian's development in other ways, including through donations.
About HDMI Output Issue Clarification:
In my debugging process, I did not see any error messages related to this issue in the dmesg logs. This led me to suspect that it might be related to the changes made in PR #2016, which appears to have disabled certain HDMI features, preventing error messages from appearing.
Since I observed similar issues in other distributions based on the mainline kernel, such as DietPi, I began to suspect that the issue might be inherent to the mainline kernel itself. However, LibreELEC did not exhibit this problem, suggesting that they may have fixed the issue in some way.
Since I did not receive further discussion on PR #2016 in the Armbian community, I reached out to the DietPi author. He was very willing to discuss the issue with me, for which I expressed my thanks to him. This was purely a thank you for his willingness to invest time in helping, and it was not meant as a criticism of any other organizations or individuals.
I fully understand your point that the development team's resources are mainly focused on the officially supported versions, and community-supported versions may not receive timely responses. I sincerely appreciate the contributions Armbian has made to the SBC ecosystem, particularly tools like armbian-config, which greatly help users resolve issues. I will follow your advice and try switching to other kernel versions for further testing.
Best regards
