NanoPi Neo3 OS alternatives

[MarkLuun]

Hi Armbians :)

 

Armbian's discontinued support of the NanoPi Neo3 board, hit me very hard.  I have operated multiple of these SBCs with Armbian very stable, in different DCs for a long time.  Because of the defunctional kernel under Armbian, I was forced to look around for alternatives and only came across Manjaro, DietPi and Friendlyarm published by FriendlyElec themself.  

Unfortunately I was not happy with Manjaro and Friendlyarm.  

Dietpi, on the other hand, seems to be doing quite well till now.  And most importantly, it doesn't seem to have the kernel/ reboot problem that affected Armbian.  

 

But how can that be if it's based on Armbian?  Can someone explain that to me?

[Igor]

7 hours ago, MarkLuun said:

I was forced to look around for alternatives

Their "support" means they download Armbian, unmodified and untested upstream kernel (Manjaro) or presentation kernel (from HW seller) and put on their label. In case you want to see a board supported, start to understand that supporting hardware generate expenses. We can't steal the value from Dietpi, Manjaro or others, since they are not creating it. 

 

Take your time and read those pages - its well explained:

https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_FAQ/

https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Board-Support-Rules/ (as you can see - images can be back if someone take responsibility under certain conditions, some burden away)

https://www.armbian.com/newsflash/armbian-needs-your-help/

 

tl;dr; Sadly also when people said they will help, they don't show up when little help is needed and there are so little donations and subscriptions that they have absolutely no impact on the costs. If costs are not covered not even in 1% how do you think we can help you? 

[Igor]

8 hours ago, MarkLuun said:

But how can that be if it's based on Armbian?  Can someone explain that to me?

Since they have no R&D outside scripts that changes appearance and install some apps that would be some random act, probably something is not fully updated or they use stock FriendlyArm presentation kernel. Either way this is on you to find out if you are interested to know. We have enough of our troubles which is why we are limiting what we will do.

[Igor]

14 hours ago, MarkLuun said:

I was forced to look around for alternatives

 

The case is that with all those actions we are actually forcing you to start thinking about supporting us - currently you support our work with less then 0.5%. We can raise this number in two ways - cutting the value we are giving or you start giving something in return. 

 

If we fail to persuade you to help and invest into our work, we have nothing to loose. You loose. Our copy cats can only provide the same.

 

Alternatives are here to deceive - add as low as possible or just something and take as much as possible. Remember that by using our kernel means they don't need to invest nothing into R&D, sales only. This is totally different league. We have to. Their support, when it comes to expensive to solve problems, looks like this:

Their "customers" which costs them close to nothing, but costs us a lot, perhaps even donating them money because (our) OS works so good ... They steal from our work and also steer their customers to us to steal more, even we asked them not to, even they know we will not support them since we have no budget to support expensive technical problems even for people that believes in us and supports us. 

 

In case you don't want to have half working software that is destined to fall apart sooner or later with fake support or as cheap support as possible (Manjaro, Arch, Debian) you actually have no alternative.

[MarkLuun]

vor 9 Stunden schrieb Igor:

 

The case is that with all those actions we are actually forcing you to start thinking about supporting us - currently you support our work with less then 0.5%. We can raise this number in two ways - cutting the value we are giving or you start giving something in return. 

 

If we fail to persuade you to help and invest into our work, we have nothing to loose. You loose. Our copy cats can only provide the same.

 

Alternatives are here to deceive - add as low as possible or just something and take as much as possible. Remember that by using our kernel means they don't need to invest nothing into R&D, sales only. This is totally different league. We have to. Their support, when it comes to expensive to solve problems, looks like this:

Their "customers" which costs them close to nothing, but costs us a lot, perhaps even donating them money because (our) OS works so good ... They steal from our work and also steer their customers to us to steal more, even we asked them not to, even they know we will not support them since we have no budget to support expensive technical problems even for people that believes in us and supports us. 

 

In case you don't want to have half working software that is destined to fall apart sooner or later with fake support or as cheap support as possible (Manjaro, Arch, Debian) you actually have no alternative.

 

I already started to donate to Armbian  by Paypal subscription ;).

This is a great project and should be treated this way :).

 

 

[tea]

Hello Mark, Did you make any progress with this?

[Igor]

12 hours ago, tea said:

Hello Mark, Did you make any progress with this?

Images with support on general Linux support level (not better not worse then alternatives) can be downloaded here:
https://github.com/armbian/community

[9bx154]

Hi,
I would like to note that for NanoPi Neo3 it is quite possible to use firmware from Nano Pi R2S, because they have almost identical hardware specs.
Excellent firmware can be found here https://sd-card-images.johang.se/boards/nanopi_r2s.html, these are unoffical, minimal, pure and up-to-date vanilla Debian/Ubuntu Linux SD card images...