Support of Raspberry Pi

[Aux]

23 hours ago, Tido said:

However, comparing a Porsche and a Dacia  (XU4 vs RPi) 

 

 

Hehehehe...  - a snobbish opinion, good luck with the nose high!

[Tido]

4 minutes ago, Aux said:

snobbish opinion

*ROTFL*  read this thread from the begin to the end. Then look at this site: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4-special-price/   consider pro & con's   currently $ 49.-  and if you still don't understand... shit happens.

 

[TonyMac32]

 
Hehehehe...  - a snobbish opinion, good luck with the nose high!

A realistic one performance wise I'm afraid. More (and faster) ram, more (and faster) processor cores, more bandwidth (anything with more than 1 USB port has more available bandwidth than an RPi), more GPU... I could go on. The RPi is a wonderful teaching tool and toy. Thankfully it was successful, the single board computers that existed before it we're a bit more expensive, and didn't get the press coverage, but we're also far more industrial in nature.

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[Aux]

On 5/14/2019 at 10:20 PM, Tido said:

However, comparing a Porsche and a Dacia  (XU4 vs RPi) 

 

 

That's right Porsche is expensive and only for rich people.
But Dacia will also lead you to the finish, maybe not as fast as Porsche but still, not only a Porsche creates a million kilometer, Skoda fabia too :-)

Is a thing how you look at it.

 

 

[TonyMac32]

 
That's right Porsche is expensive and only for rich people.
But Dacia will also lead you to the finish, maybe not as fast as Porsche but still, not only a Porsche creates a million kilometer, Skoda fabia too :-)
Is a thing how you look at it.
 
 

An RPi is not

1) reliable
2) the most cost-effective
3) worth $35
4) worth any more discussion.

The position of this project stands, we will not support a failure prone, insecure, underperforming, inefficient, abysmally bandwidth throttled device. If an RPi 4 comes out that uses a sane bootloader and a useful SoC then this can be revisited.

Do not continue your personal argument with Tido; it is not value-added, and your positions add nothing other than conflict. Mostly because you have no facts or reason for your position, and instead of trying to formulate something approaching a case for support resort to ad hominem attacks and downright inaccuracies. This is an unofficial warning to stop harassing the team because you aren't getting your way. The next will be official.

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[chwe]

On 6/5/2019 at 1:12 AM, TonyMac32 said:

The next will be official.

I see some decent moderator skills here... @Igor @lanefu we should change his official title here..

 

btw. if this thread goes back and forth.. I'll simply close it until the first iteration of a not VC4 based RPi is out (or someone wrote a bootloader which allows to boot without binaries provided by the foundation ).

[Aux]

@TonyMac32

who do you Think You Are?
Who had the right to remind me?
In the forum one discusses and the Tido had grinned me first.
If you think I'm only concerned with Raspberry's you're wrong. I also use Nanopi M4 as a NAS server and am very satisfied with it.
My initial question was just to see if it was Armbian OS for Raspberry Pi, but was attacked by you that Raspberry Pi is not worth coping with.
Raspberry Pi is probably for what it was thought was still suitable, as long as you do not shoot with the machine gun on sparrows :-)

 

Thanks for the attention

and sorry for Google-English

[chwe]

On 6/8/2019 at 3:55 PM, Aux said:

who do you Think You Are?

one of the maintainer of this project (dealing with rockchip and amlogic)?

 

On 6/8/2019 at 3:55 PM, Aux said:

Who had the right to remind me?
In the forum one discusses and the Tido had grinned me first.

Who has not the right to remind you that the discussion is pointless? The decision that current RPis are note supported by armbian was made a long time ago and it still stands. And for the who started first on throwing dirt to each other here doesn't matter to me.. If it's not working on a acceptable level I'll simply end it (without needing dirt.. but with something I don't like, means closing the thread).

 

On 6/8/2019 at 3:55 PM, Aux said:

My initial question was just to see if it was Armbian OS for Raspberry Pi, but was attacked by you that Raspberry Pi is not worth coping with.

and if you go through this whole thread.. You get some 'objective' and probably also a lot of subjective answers to that.. And just a last one.. Guess what happens if a platform gets added in which no developer has an interest in? Exactly, nobody cares about enhancing the support for it.. Means spending hours of hours of their spare time to make things better, following upstream to pick up stuff like this: https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/5/20/431 integrate it and test if it solves the crippled mailbox system the RPi has? Dealing with the blob bootloader the RPi needs and check after every update of this blob if the new one behaves similar or if they add new thermal throttling behavior which was barley annotated when the RPi3b+ came out? This stuff needs time. It's not only adding a few lines to the buildscript and you're done.. And further Pi1 and Zero is ARMv6, pi 2 is ARMv7 and some ARMv8, pi3 is ARMv8. By default we provide userspace matching to CPU architecture.. It will be a nightmare to explain again and again (and again) that a RPi2 image might not work on a RPi3. That by using RPi3 a bunch of the things which make the Pi useful (e.g. the decoder stuff) might not work cause all the userspace stuff isn't armhf on armbian for 64bit CPUs.

 

With Raspian, there's a decent image out for RPis, it gets updates it supports the hardware. It's not armbian but also a debian derivative. And if, for whatever reason you want a Armbian userspace but don't want to deal with kernel work nor bootloader etc. @tkaiser provides a OS layer to frankenstein a 'Armbian on RPi' together (https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/OMV_for_Raspberries). And if you want to deal with kernel as well.. Fork armbian, add the needed configs for kernel bootloader etc. Glue everything together and deal with the FAT partition the RPi needs for its bootloader (basically the buildscript should allow such FAT partitions). Find a suitable Kernel (probably the one RPi provides on their GitHub - or if you really want to deal with it.. go for a mainline) and craft your own image, based on armbians buildscript (it's on github, everyone can fork it). But don't expect that someone does the work for you especially if those people are simply not interested in the currently available iterations of the RPi. 

And don't expect as well that they always take as much time as I took this time to explain it again and again, when someone shows up complaining that we don't provide Armbian for RPi... I needed a break from writing serious stuff..

 

 

[Aux]

Many Thanks @chwe

That was the best answer I have received here so far.
Why not immediately so that you understand it correctly?  
Of course, this raises a different view of RPi!

 

Thanks again for the explanation!

[chwe]

52 minutes ago, Aux said:

That was the best answer I have received here so far.
Why not immediately so that you understand it correctly?  

 

 

hmm..

 

the bits to grap this information are here and there.. It needs time to summarize them.. It's mostly a boring task to summarize them, and it comes with *random board*... It's not only the RPi which some random people would like to see supported.. And normally it comes with.. why is *random board* not supported not, based on my attempts, *random board* could be an new interesting platform to support, this, this and this is currently working, here there and there I'm struggling to get things working, I would like to share my work and hope that you can give me some hints to fix them..

 

Good examples how things can go in the right direction:

 

and a few others (shamelessly I would say that the mt7623 platform bring up thread of mine is also a good one, even when things are on hold since a long time).

 

 

It's a time vs. worthiness decision and @TonyMac32 decided to keep it short (which is completely fine, I would do it as well if I wouldn't need a break from thesis writing.. )

54 minutes ago, Aux said:

Of course, this raises a different view of RPi!

not really, there are still cases where the RPi shines. It's not as expensive, it's available more or less everywhere.. so if you need a board immediately it might be worth to think about the RPi as well. I've one on my own for a camera related project, where the power is sufficient.. I've set 2-3 up for projects of colleagues.. They can't manage them on their own, and I don't want to deal with those boards anymore.. So an RPi is a save bet.. I can setup a crontab for updates (so that it's not one of those sloppy IoT devices used in botnets - or at least not more than the other RPis around the world) and if they mess up things I've a bash scripts which modifies their 'default raspbian' to their needs (there's absolutely nothing fancy at their needs, it could probably be solved with a ESP8266). I didn't want to wait until another boards makes it through customs and fear that I've to pay some additional taxes.. So going to the next local store, buying a RPi and the most ugly case I could find and a reliable SD-Card and everyone was fine. The Pi is Ok and has its value.. generally spoken it's just not attractive to the developers here, therefore they spend their time on stuff they're interested in.

 

 

[williamv]

and then there is Raspberrypi 4 that changes everything.

[TonyMac32]

Maybe, maybe not. If their CompaTability nonsense can simply be ignored, and the ARM cores are in control, then yes. If VC6 is running the show, it is the same. :-/

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[sfx2000]

On 6/30/2019 at 12:53 PM, williamv said:

and then there is Raspberrypi 4 that changes everything.

 

It's a good board - but different community.

 

There's still the remaining issues with RPi in general, including the Pi4 - much of that is the walled garden that the Pi Foundation has - inside knowledge of the bootloader and first stage on the boot process before the ARM's are running - and that's still in the firmware blob that Pi and Broadcom have total control over.

 

There's other interesting boards with full support from Armbian.

[Zhan Karibzhanov]

If rpi4 won't be supported either, and you won't even list it as unsupported on main page, edit the first post and lock the thread?

[Zhan Karibzhanov]

Also I happen to have bought the rpi4 knowing full well that its crap, but I preffered to not ship stuff from korea, and buy from one of several local vendors of rpi.

[Igor]

Raspberry Pi OS started to secretly (!?) adding Microsoft proprietary package base, access to their servers, by default. 

 

Security consequences? tl;dr; ... Microsoft gained root access to millions of Rpi users without their consent or awareness. From the outside. This is bad, but it is actually much worse since from the inside they already have full control of your Raspberry Pi regardless of operating system of your choice. Linux/BSD/* can't boot without proprietary Microsoft owned real time OS.

 

Most of the RPi users probably just don't care, others are naively assuming they are running FOSS software. Well, a part of it is, a part not. Not as bad as Android, but still. You can peek into the code, but at the end, Google, or lets say corpo world, is/are fully in charge of our mobile devices. Mainly with services.

 

After recent Chromium improvements, this is yet another loss for (Linux) community and FOSS in general.

 

http://techrights.org/2021/02/02/microsoft-pi/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3536569/inside-microsofts-latest-os-azure-rtos.html

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-distributors-frustrated-by-googles-new-chromium-web-browser-restrictions/

[cnxsoft]

59 minutes ago, Igor said:

Raspberry Pi OS started to secretly (!?) adding Microsoft proprietary package base, access to their servers, by default. 

 

As I understand it, it's for Visual Studio Code that can be used to program the just released Raspberry Pi Pico.

[Igor]

Just now, cnxsoft said:

As I understand it's for Visual Studio Code that can be used to program the just released Raspberry Pi Pico.

 

We can't say their motivation is bad within this move, but MS loves Linux is still a wolf disguised into a sheep. As bad intention can only be classified as a speculation and it is hard to prove they are actually doing something bad, making it possible or have a direct possibility is bad enough. If folks, one don't trust, have root and if they also control your ignition ... 

[arox]

1 hour ago, cnxsoft said:

As I understand it, it's for Visual Studio Code that can be used to program the just released Raspberry Pi Pico.

They (who ?) seems to be pushing a lot for the Raspberry Pi Pico. I am not convinced by the micro-controller itself nor by the low price. (The RPI foundation already did that with PI Zero). For that use case and price range, the base software quality and community support is much more important than the price and even the IDE (otherwise Arduino would not exist anymore) - and Visual xxx is a no-go for me. As well, I had a very bad experience with the memory consumption of interpreted language like Lua on esp8266 and will not invest on micopython on that sort of devices.

 

I don't understand what the RPI foundation is looking for ? Concurrence Arduino, the chinese Espressif hegemony or the ridiculous Micro:bit device ? So, sell their soul to the devil for that is a bit unreasonable ?

[DevShanky]

https://www.zdnet.com/article/raspberry-pi-now-weve-sold-30-million/

 

What is it that makes it such a huge success?

 

-R

 

 

[manuti]

8 hours ago, DevShanky said:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/raspberry-pi-now-weve-sold-30-million/

What is it that makes it such a huge success?

-R

Hey, @DevShanky if you are interested in a historic progression of sales you can check this Google Sheet. (I'm not the creator nor owner).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zWwpcckDEEVAhNH3y7JQGxxbjP42nUywPOzDWr1fH28/edit?usp=sharing

 

[E.M.Smith]

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.

[Louis]

Hmm. I'm trying to figure out how to respond to the overall tenor of this forum. It's difficult. I'm trying here to be generous and please note that this response is not to everyone.

 

I turn 60 this year, with over 35 years in an engineering and IT career, including involvement with a lot of open source projects. I've worked on many standards committees and I have a demonstrable history of being able to communicate effectively. I'm not going to tout my credentials further because they mean nothing to the point I'm going to make, but please understand that I've worked in many places with strong engineering practices, with hundreds of millions up to billions of dollars in hardware and software. I'm neither an amateur nor a noob.

 

Today I downloaded Armbian to run on an Orange Pi 4. I use a lot of different boards, including various models of the Raspberry Pi.

 

Despite the fact that I've just gone to the trouble of installing Armbian and it looks fine, I'm going to remove it.

 

Why? Because of reading posts in this forum, where I initially came simply to find some information but found instead a number of individuals (apparently among the leaders of the Armbian community) who I simply cannot abide because their attitudes, their anger, their sociopathy, because their deserved or undeserved hatred of the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi community is so explicit and offensive and ugly that every time I were to turn on my Orange Pi I'd think about those attitudes and that would just stink. If you guys can't be gentlemen, can't at least in public be diplomatic, can't stop calling people "clueless" and "idiots" and believing in "fairy tales and miracles", why do you think anyone exposed to your attitude would want to be associated with you? You sound like you're either 12 year olds or people severely on the spectrum who have no idea how to communicate in a healthy manner with other people. I can only assume you really don't care, or think your attitude is somehow cool, or feel there's little value in building a community. Or something. I don't know you, I'm neither your analyst nor your judge. But I would suggest seeking some counseling.

 

No, you don't need my support. We don't know each other and I'm sure you won't miss me. I only hope before you decide that I'm simply another "idiot" (which I assume is how you deal with anyone you disagree with) you consider that having this kind of attitude towards other people doesn't benefit you, doesn't benefit anyone, is corrosive to the development of your own community. If you don't want the ignorant infecting your little pond it will dry up. The ignorant eventually learn and contribute mightily in a community. Despite their technical contributions those who disparage others in the way I've seen here will eventually destroy a community. If the Armbian project fails it probably won't because of any technical problem. Please learn to be nice to people, even noobs. Nobody wants the stink that you are raising on their hands. I certainly don't.

 

I'll go elsewhere to find nicer people. Good bye.

[NicoD]

1 hour ago, Louis said:

Why? Because of reading posts in this forum, where I initially came simply to find some information but found instead a number of individuals (apparently among the leaders of the Armbian community)

You are free to think and believe what you want. As is Armbian free to use or not to use if you don't want to.
There are very good reasons why Armbian does not support Raspberry Pi. There is software available for RPis, so the need for Armbian isn't big.
RPi isn't open source as the other supported SBCs.(ThreadX) 
The installed OS does not control the board. There are things happening without anyone knowing what and why.

RPi can be used for some goals. But it is too buggy to support. Undervoltages, overheating, not showing true details...

And as you say yourself, Armbian is a "community". Not a cult. We have community members, not leaders. I even think the person you talk about hasn't had anything to do with armbian for a long time. And even if I would not agree with that person. I defend his right to talk the way he feels like. 
Not everyone is always as gentle in how they talk. We are all adults, and I think we should be able to handle that. 
Go look at RPi fora and let me know what kind of talk you find their. Even having a light discussion isn't possible their. 
Greetings.

[Louis]

Hi NicoD,

 

Thanks sincerely for your reply. Having read through the entirety of this topic I believe I understand the pros and cons of Armbian supporting or not supporting the Raspberry Pi. I wasn't addressing that specifically, more to do with the rather offensive attitude taken towards anyone who might have the temerity to actually admit using a Raspberry Pi. It's hardly a welcoming attitude.

 

I think I've been participating in online discussions since USENET the mid-80s so I'm aware of the variety of people, personalities and attitudes displayed online. I'm not advocating censoring anyone, only that anyone who uses a Raspberry Pi coming into this community might think everyone here thinks we're idiots and noobs. Yes, everyone has a right to their own opinion, even when it is offensive. But that probably has turned a number of people away, intelligent people who don't appreciate being characterised as idiots simply because they choose (often for very good reasons) to use a Raspberry Pi. As an adult, yeah, sure, I can handle it, but I don't appreciate being insulted any more than the next person. Is that good for the Armbian community?

 

And I haven't had the experience you've had on Raspberry Pi forums, either open or commercial. Yes, there are some children (literally) there and beginners, but most people seem pretty helpful. I've had plenty of light discussions and people have helped me through various problems, and I've done likewise for others. It's a community -- like this one. I bought my first Pi in 2011 -- it's still working fine. I've had about a half dozen of them around my house running 24/7 for the past six or seven years without a single problem. I've not found them particularly buggy (not more than any other computer), I've not had problems with undervoltage, overheating, etc. as you say. By comparison, I have had many, many problems with many of the alternative ARM boards, which are often almost undocumented, often buggy, require kernel hacks to function, have GPIO pins in odd places or not supported correctly, etc.  My Orange Pi is running at 85°C doing much less than my Raspberry Pi is at 56°C. I've had nothing but trouble getting the I2C bus on my NanoPi Fire3 running, and every time I install the nvGRAPH library on my Xavier NX it bricks. But I accept that these boards aren't sold in the tens of millions like the Pi. I'm also not calling people who use them idiots.

 

All I'm advocating is that people (some people) consider the effect of their not-so-gentle attitudes upon those who might be interested in Armbian, because my reading through this topic has turned me away. If it's too much to ask people not to needlessly insult others, then I probably wouldn't enjoy hanging around here very much anyway. As you say, I'm free to use or not use Armbian.

 

And finally, the Raspberry Pi OS is actually open source and can be found at:  https://github.com/raspberrypi

[arox]

I think Armbian is more a Release Management System than an Operating System. 

 

It targets an upper level of abstraction and so needs to comply with other constraints. Porting Debian to RPI is more easy than porting  Debian thru an automated process on different platforms. And supporting RPI is to much specific for the interest.

 

But you are right anyway : Raspbian do the job, RPI is not evil and has is strengths and weaknesses. It can then be a reference of what should be reach in matter of stability and avoided in other domains.

 

As long as Armbian works on the same upward distribution (Debian), I don't think that supporting RPI is fundamentally important. Working at an upper level of software management allow to provide a solution for basic users and justify restrictions for more advanced users. Armbian may explore some specific software implementation. If that implementations prove their usefulness, it is much easy to tweek Raspbian for adding them than tweek Armbian to support RPI. (So we should better ask Raspberry Pi foundation to adopt Armbian choices than the opposite).

 

Support exactly the same software on very different platforms (in term of architecture, usage and power) has always be a bad idea. 

[lanefu]

3 hours ago, Louis said:

Yes, everyone has a right to their own opinion, even when it is offensive. But that probably has turned a number of people away, intelligent people who don't appreciate being characterised as idiots simply because they choose (often for very good reasons) to use a Raspberry Pi. As an adult, yeah, sure, I can handle it, but I don't appreciate being insulted any more than the next person. Is that good for the Armbian community?

 

Sorry about the bad vibes.   Honestly I think we need to do a better job at lowering expectations.     RPI sets a high standard for general user experience because of the limited scope of targeted devices, volume of developers and community, and defaulting first to out-of-tree drivers, blobs, and resources via NDA's with Broadcom to ship a product that has full software functionality to accompany its hardware.

Alternative SBC vendors often create a false-promise of users having a similar experience with their product by the way marketing hardware capabilities and leaning on the reputation of RPI by selling a similar product.

 

End-result is users buy these alternative SBCs, have a terrible experience, hear Armbian is the best, come to Armbian and have better software, but Armbian still focuses on mainline, so the experience isn't that of RPI and articulating the many nuances as to WHY Armbian can't just work like the Raspian experience on RPi because challenging.    Then the fall-out ensues when newer users treat Armbian like a vendor and share their dissatisfaction that a capability for a piece of hardware they bought from someone else isn't work with community software integrated or provided by Armbian.

 

We could certainly use more tenured technical people to help articulate that message.

[NicoD]

@LouisI use Raspberry Pi's. I also started with Raspberry and they did a good job for some use cases. Then I kept buying other boards, and getting some for free. I use SBCs for a lot of things. 
It is not bad saying you use RPis. 
But if you'd be used using more other boards you would understand there is a big difference in board quality with other companies. 
Raspberry Pi have good/a lot of software thanks to the big community. But their boards are flawed.

You may not notice this, but many do. If you don't use an official Raspberry Pi PSU you'll get a thunderbold symbol in the top right of your display. This will lower clock speeds to 600Mhz, without showing this happening.
Normal PSU's deliver 5V, but the RPi wants 5.2V. This is a problem when you want to power it with other means like with some power banks.
When they overheat it is the same, it is being underclocked without showing this. 

When using a good heatsink and fan there is no problem, and the RPi2b was awesome since it didn't overheat at all. 
But after that the 3b, 3b+, 4b, 400... all are flawed designs. Of all the boards I've got, I've only got these hardware problems with the raspberry pi's. 
I love single board computers. So all I want is as good raspberry pi's as possible. 

I also prefer friendly conversations. But some people you can not change. You either accept them the way they are, or you ban them. 

If they contribute, a bit more is accepted. 

[Igor]

7 hours ago, Louis said:

Please learn to be nice to people, even noobs.

 

I can say this is an excuse but being nice and professional requires much more energy we don't have. Everytime there is a pressure on Armbian, and this happens daily, that has to fix or do something, an unhealthy and unsustainable relationship is formed. Putting a pressure on contributors is a very bad move and another source of troubles. But "you" don't care about that. Hard to be nice to someone that acts like jerk (noob or not), requires pro grade services worth tens or hundreds thousands of dollars ... on and on. I can understand that noobs have no clue, but when telling people that their problem will not be fixed today, nor this week or year ... is not nice to hear. Frustration mounts up, people are angry. Givers receive close to nothing, not even thank you, for their hard work of helping, solving problems and continuous maintaining and some R&D from takers ... certainly some source of anger perhaps?
 

7 hours ago, Louis said:

If you guys can't be gentlemen, can't at least in public be diplomatic, can't stop calling people "clueless" and "idiots"

There is a search button - you can do your own research how many times those words were used and by who / how many different people. You can't say this is a community of hate, but we can be sometimes tensed and not supportive. We ran 30-40 h per day service virtually without any budget and most of our "clients" are frustrated since they are totally out of reality. They expect full blown Linux out of nothing on a brand new hardware. Which normally takes years to develop vs. virtualized Linux that works of much better just because of that.

 

It's a big pressure and people do snap sometimes. It's human nature / bug.
 

7 hours ago, Louis said:

believing in "fairy tales and miracles"

 

Broadcom / Raspberry Pi foundation has a very nice and professional attitude, but closed product, which sadly fully rely on community support, are bad for that community. It's not just Armbian attitude, but also from people that understand Linux or those close to Debian, which are perhaps more orthodox when its about FOSS.

 

Whenever you are purchasing some commercial product you have to believe into something. We are just trying to shape that. For fun and FYI.

 

If we tell you, that they sold you BS, while you are happy like a child, ofc your feelings will be hurt. So please tell me, how to do that without making more damage? Keep quiet and nod to corporations that milks us? Some do, we don't. I don't say someone is idiot because he is using Rpi, but one should at least question why hardware engineers community, those who actually waste their time to provide support is pissed on vendors, because they are hiding internals and keep full control over the chip. Do you have any estimation how much time (and our money) was lost because of that fact? I don't want to think about ... Closed hardware is like a cancer, a slap toward Linux community. IMO, there lies another big part for this conflict. And the reason why bad words has been used.

 

4 hours ago, Louis said:

And finally, the Raspberry Pi OS is actually open source and can be found at:  https://github.com/raspberrypi

Opinions are always perspective matter. From hardware engineering perspective, from things we do around here, is as open source as this:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-machines/

If you have physical connection to your Pi, you can cut the power or attach it. Attach something else. That's you freedom. Of course I am exaggerating, so you will perhaps stop, think and look on things from a different angle.

Hardware engineers can be offended, when we start talking about Pi this way, end customer who only wants to run some application ... usually don't care if they don't have full access to hardware. They don't even know what that means. We do.

 

7 hours ago, Louis said:

I'm neither an amateur nor a noob.

Neither people around. Which is the reason that topics as such exists. Try looking beyond ...

 

People with lots of knowledge and years of experience is very difficult to convince someone is messing with their know-how and perception. And that someone is not Armbian - we are just delivering something we know and something we are not happy about.

 

I am not native speaker so I apologize if some wording is not well crafted.

[Louis]

Hi NicoD,

 

Certainly, if one is underpowering any device (not just computers) the results are expected to be sub-optimal. The published voltage requirement of a Pi is 5.1v, with 4.75v being the low end for the Pi itself, where USB and other connected devices may fail before that point. As I mentioned, I've got a whole bunch of Pi 3 B+ and Zero Ws running on normal 5v USB power supplies and they've been 24/7 functional for years. I've got several robots with Pi 3 B+ and Pololu 5.0v regulators and yes, I do on occasion see brownouts (due to system load on the PSU) where the clock speed drops to compensate, but the Pi (and the robot) at least keeps going. I've ended up using variable PSUs set to 5.1v and the performance is much better. On systems with non-Pi SBCs I've had similar performance. The Orange Pi power consumption is almost twice that of a Pi 4 and runs a lot hotter, and I've not seen significant performance gains for my specific purposes so I'll likely go back to the Pi 4, maybe the Pi 3 B+ would suffice. I have been using passive heat sinks on the robots and software-controlled fans for the hotter SBCs. But I'm running most of this kind of thing on 5v 14A power supplies that are rock-solid.

 

And thank you, I also appreciate friendly conversations. I completely understand the frustration in dealing with people who are being jerks. The world is difficult enough without resorting to name-calling, insulting or degrading language. It doesn't do anyone any good. I've found that everyone has value, regardless of background or experience, and while beginners and people with mistaken expectations can at times be truly annoying, it's better to try to explain to them the nature of volunteer labour and hope they understand. Or eventually leave. But as I'm sure you all have seen, sometimes the beginners grow up and become really valuable members of the community, and sometimes all it takes is a little bit of gentle explaining on how to behave.