Amlogic has no real-world interest in Armbian or any other mainline tracking Linux distro so they are not going to fork over any $$$ for support. Their business is heavily focussed on Android and some other niche use-cases. Like most/all SoC manufacturers, their responsibilities are to their customers (integrators who buy their silicon chips) and their shareholders, not consumer end-users in the Linux community who want to reflash a $30 device with a $0 distro image that doesn't use any of their software (which is a good thing, the BSP sucks).
"Board" devices from any vendor are generally simple to support since the vendor ships u-boot and kernel sources with varying levels of contact and engagement with the community. "Box" devices are a completely different game, with a massively larger amount of guesswork required to get working and a huge issue with device cloning and hidden spec changes. For example; the current X96-Air (S905X3) model which is popular ships in three different configurations and has been witnesssed with 4x different SDIO WiFi/BT chips; which necessitate a different device-tree file to have the right drivers (which mostly don't exist in mainline) probed. These devices are great when they work, but mostly they don't, and they're a massive and frustrating time sink to support, and the percentage of self-entitled users who get whiny about them seems to be an order of magnitude greater than those using boards. So any sane distro maintainer will (and should) focus on supporting boards. Once in a while there will be box exceptions, but they will be infrequent.
Any attempt to cause deliberate harm to user installations via software is unethical and I would expect the Armbian forum moderators to take appropriate action to deny promotion or access to such images via this forum if that actually happened. I know that I would take swift action to delete posts/threads and perhaps temp-ban users if this happend in the LibreELEC forums. However I suspect some of the alarm is caused by GoogleTranslate more than Oleg .. it does seem to translate Russian > English with very firm (borderline aggressive) words. Once in a while I've made him post in his native language, which I can read/undertand to a moderate level, and the tone is different.
As a side note, I'm stunned to hear that Armbian running costs are 2,000-5,000 EUR per-day .. LibreELEC runs around $2,500 per year
Me too, mine arrived yesterday, but the 48W switching power supply arrived today. Only the installation was a bit fiddly. I had copied Armbian_5.65_Nanopim4_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.4.162_desktop to an SD at the end of October and transferred it from there to an eMMC using armbian-config. In December I had packed a mSATA SSD into a USB3 case, connected it to the NanoPi and very conveniently, with armbian-config, integrated the USB SSD so that it boots from the eMMC.
So far so good, I was satisfied with this solution. When I then installed the SATA HAT, the NanoPi didn't want to boot from a current Armbian Ubuntu, nor from an Armbian Stretch, nor from an older version, as long as the eMMC was installed at the same time. Then I installed an SD version of Friendly Core Bionic and repartitioned the eMMC. Then I could boot normally with Armbian_5.75_Nanopim4_Debian_stretch_default_4.4.174 from SD and set up the eMMC first, reboot and without SD, set up the SATA SSD in a second pass. Fiddling with a SMD tweezer to insert or remove the eMMC under the SATA HAT was a bit annoying. But with the RockPi 4 it's even narrower under the cooler.
It wouldn't hurt to ask Libre Computer and point out that their not-so-successful campaign (around 68% of target reached) might have been successful if they would have broad and stable support from Armbian.
That was the main road block for me - the software. The fact that they promise mainline kernel, starting from 4.19, actually made me buy it. All ARM devices are sketchy in this regard. With mainline support, I can use the device as long as I like, without falling behind and stuck with old kernels.
emk2203 reacted to chewitt in Information for users of TV boxes on the Amlogic platform
emk2203 got a reaction from gounthar in ROC-RK3399-PC (Renegade Elite)