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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

I don't think so. I actively use some of the Pi alternatives, and none of them are well-polished and stable as Raspberry Pis.

Also, an IPO doesn't mean that a company will go downhill from there. For example, when Bending Spoons got Evernote, everybody prepared for the worst, but it didn't happen, at least yet. They are genuinely trying to make it better from my understanding, at least for now.

I think the biggest thread to ARM SBC ecosystem is Intel's N series systems, which can run both Linux and Windows 11 equally well. An N95 runs a familiar chipset & ISA with familiar system dynamics and standard ports with good IO performance. They can act as good home servers and entry level home computers.

Who can deny the charm of a small box with a mSATA + NVMe port, WiFi6, a proper BIOS, two screen outs backed by an acceptable GPU?

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> I actively use some of the Pi alternatives, and none of them are well-polished and stable as Raspberry Pis.

Exactly.

Pis are obviously not perfect. You can definitely find much better "deals" - but overall it is a very good product for what you're paying for.

There are some killer features every Pi has:

1. Non-brickable: Either your SD Card is gone, or your board is broken. There's no middle.

2. Trusted OS: You can trust the OS from get go.

3. Customizable install with flasher: Spend 30 seconds setting up your Pi before installing it to the SD card. Doing the same setup post install takes hours in some cases.

4. Seamless migration: Poweroff Pi, get the card out, insert to newer Pi, power on, go on.

I'm not adding small yet irreplaceable features like undervoltage warning in the system logs.

I'm running a OrangePi 5B with their original Debian image. While it's not doing any shenanigans from what I see, it needs half a day to convert it from a toy with auto-login to a proper home server, and the OS is finicky. Some mounts fail during boot causing it to enter maintenance mode. Adding "nofail" to boot options makes mounts succeed on every boot.

Interesting device.

> 2. Trusted OS: You can trust the OS from get go.

Mostly true. However I did experience issues that led to less than 100% trust.

When I got my Pi 5, I ordered an NVME HAT and was thrilled to be able to run the Pi from an NVME SSD. Then one day it would not boot. The messages on the screen indicated that it no longer saw the SSD. Booting from an SD card, it also did not see the SSD. Convinced that the NVME HAT had malfunctioned, I initiated a return through Amazon and eventually acquired another. About that time I discovered that there were known SSDs that did not work with the Pi, including the one I had. IOW, a S/W update had caused a working system to malfunction. A different SSD has been working without difficulty.

I was also puzzled that the imager did not list the current version of the OS for a Pi Zero. I asked about this on the official forum and my post was removed without notification.

Also at one point, a system installed to an SD card on a Pi 5 would not boot on a 4B. That has been fixed and in fact, the 5 and 4B use different kernels. One side effect of this is that on `apt upgrade` the process tells me that a different kernel will be used on reboot. (It won't.)

The Pi 5 is a massive shift in architecture and there is still (IMO) significant technical debt that the Pi engineers are catching up with. (But not enough to cause me to look elsewhere.)

We put different meanings behind the word trust.

Yes, Raspbian is not 100% dependable/reliable, esp. when it comes to NVMe boot. They're trying to tune things aggresively for 5. I got three eeprom updates in two days in one case, when they were trying to tune temperature dependent clocking for RAM.

However I trust the OS to not do any backdooring/spying shenanigans since it's mostly pulled from Debian's official repositories.

However, even the OrangePi 5B uses almost the same repos with Raspberry Pi, I had to give it a purposeful dig to make sure.

I watched Jeff Geerling's video yesterday about NVMe hats, and he openly said that the firmware is picky about SSDs. In fact signalling over flex cables is problematic.

I built a BMAX-B4 N95 system for my parents to replace their big tower system. It has two SATA ports. One SATA and one mSATA. SATA port is routed to a slot via a flex cable, and Samsung's 870EVO sometimes initializes a couple of milliseconds late causing system to not to boot. I'll probably move everything to mSATA drive and let it slide, or try another brand of SSD hoping that it'll like the flex cable a bit more.

5. An alternative Amiga/Atari/Commodore/Speccy like form factor. :)

Yeah, but an N95/N100 box is not much bigger than a C64 power brick, either, which is both fascinating and frightening at the same time. :)

I think I can convert my spare Pi3 to a "boot to an emulator" system.

That wasn't really what I was talking about, rather the Raspberry Pi 400.

For the line of thought you replied, I would be more keen on a ESP32 instead.

> an IPO doesn't mean that a company will go downhill from there. For example, when Bending Spoons got Evernote

No that's not an example. Bending Spoons has not IPOed.

Let's change Evernote/Bending Spoons with ARM.

As of yesterday, ARM's architecture powers world's 4th fastest supercomputer Fugaku.

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