70-80% of other Armbian users I have encountered (outside this forum) are only looking for 1 thing. Ubuntu desktop or server on their TV box or new SBC toy. Armbian just happens to be the easiest way for semi or non technical users. Usually they come looking for Armbian or something similar because of problems or limitations in the stock Ubuntu image offered by their ODM. I say Ubuntu because thats what most have them have heard of or run in a VM so thats what they ask for. Very few of them have even heard of Debian. These people are not interested in development or bug fixing or contributing. They will however spread the good (or bad) word depending on their experience, and that is very important for the long term viability of any project. While the individual opinion of anyone from this group is pretty much irrelevant to development process the collective opinion is valuable and should be listened too.
How do you keep these people out of developer discussions? New users dont get posting privileges to Developer support unless they contribute (code, docs, bug fix, cash donations, etc) and you expand peer to peer tech support.
1. What does Armbian bring to the SBC and its users that the Vendor does/can not?
2. What does the SBC, it's vendor, and its users bring to Armbian that would be a benefit to the community?
Im not sure what Armbian brings to a particular SBC is important. It may be, but from my commercial perspective SBC's come and go fast, SBC retailers come and go fast, users mostly have no loyalty to either, they just want an operating platform that consistent and usable across projects.
You mentioned the concept of an "Armbian Device" which I think is a great concept, hard to define right now, but the concept of an "Armbian Device" that just works with your project code, no changes, is a very powerful concept. In my experience thats what devs and aspiring devs are looking for. Thats why I suggested the standardised functionality in the meltdown/spectre post. That standardised functionality would also elevate Armbian's usefulness well above any stock distro or ODM image.
Users benefit a community. ALWAYS. Very few users follow specific SBC's, most of them are looking for an SBC to use with the operating platform they are familiar with. Only hardware tinkerers (which admittedly is the majority of the Armbian community) are interested in specific SBC's.
Also in general:
Most end users bring nothing of value to the table except testing, expecting end users to bring other value is unrealistic
Most board manufacturers bring very little value to the table, free boards are not a good reason to support a board
Users bring devs, devs dont bring users. This is critically important and I think overlooked by this community.
The bottom line: SBC manufacturers and boards come and go, the operating stack is way more important than the hardware. Armbian can be a much more important part of the ecosystem than any specific SBC stamper but in order to do that it has to define what it is. That may mean 2 different variants (its what we do in house), one to cater to the generic desktop / server type user and a variant specifically tailored to IoT single use devices.
This thread is not really the place but if @Igor, @tkaiser, @TonyMac32 wants to create a specific channel or thread to discuss this I would be happy to contribute in terms of ideas, infrastructure and code. Im also happy to contribute more servers for hosting and building and even funding if the development direction is clarified.
I really do not want to test on my only/production hc1 and just happened to not test on my xu4 which I normally do - once a month.
This time I did an upgrade because Baikal does not come up.
That is the next problem I will have to fix ...
At least I will drop a "few pennies" like:
2017-09-01 OMV PayPal 50 EUR
DHGE got a reaction from Igor in Problems with 5.38 update