There's always cheaper/better but change has a price too.

The points the author addresses are absolutely a thing but you get to know those after a few projects. I don't really see an upside of switching out the SBC every year (or whatever the actionable advice is meant to be here) since that's quite literally never a point I want to spend time thinking about and the Pi is good enough (tm) for my use cases. It's not like the common use case for these hobby boards is in critical infrastructure.

So, please elaborate and produce those alternatives. I know none which are documented in a way that you can get next to any ARM OS up there without too much hardship. Of course you can get an STM-based µC, but I guess this is something else than a full-blown Linux-machine@40USD.

Odroid is a better alternative these days.

I have an ODROID U2 and love it, but it was much more expensive than my Pis and is a pain in terms of OS support (I'm still running the original kernel since Hardkernel has pretty much dropped support for it, and have hacked my way up to Ubuntu 18.04 on top of it). The Pi's popularity helps a lot in terms of support.

Oh, yes? How good is it in community support, learnability and cheapness? You know, the original points of the Raspberry Pi.

What do you mean by learnability? It's Linux anyway. What you learn for the Raspberry Pi can be reapplied to any other board out there. The only aspect where compatibility depends on the board is the GPIO part.

Cheapness? Most ARM boards are in the range 50 to 60 USD and I don't know in what world that is not "cheap". Plus, at such prices you can get stuff you just can't buy with a Raspberry Pi anyway (specs wise), so it's not like they are a little more expensive for no reason.

Community support, Odroid is good enough there, while I would not recommend things like the BananaPi.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4/

For absolute beginners, a common platform is essential to be able to follow instructions, in special if they don't have external support and must learn on their own; think kids in a rural town in a developing country.

Trying to follow tutorials for the Raspberry Pi on a different platform will more often than not be a nightmare and demotivate anyone first approaching the device. There's a network effect at play, making the most popular platform also the most desirable for diving in.

As for price, 60USD is almost double the price than a Raspberry Pi 3 (and 10 times a Pi Zero), so it would be double the effort for someone with limited economical resources in those countries.

"better" only has meaning if you elaborate for what. Especially since they seem quite a bit more expensive than a Raspberry PI.

Can you be more specific? I've had a quick look on their UK site but they seem a lot more expensive (since I'll need a psu).

Except for the C2 but is that really stuck on "Ubuntu 16.04 and Android 5.1 Lollipop based on Kernel 3.14 Lts"??! Or just an outdated website? Oh and no WiFi/BLE anyway so that's out.

Which UK website? They only have one official website: https://www.hardkernel.com

C2 stuck on 16.04? I have no idea where you found that. It runs 18.04 currently since last year: https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c2/os_images/ubuntu/v3.0

And the C2 is not the right one to buy right now. You should rather consider the XU4

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4/

https://www.odroid.co.uk/ is the first result from duckduckgo. That should answer your 2nd question too. I bought an odroid some years ago (C1 maybe?) and I found quite a lot of things didn't work. I ended up paying quite a lot after the customs people had their way so I'd always go with a local distributor now. I could have returned it if I'd done that too.

That xu4 link states it runs 16.04 but maybe that's also out of date info. The cpu performance sounds good but I think we'll have to disregard the pi3 comparison they provide as per the throttling the OP describes. Usb and network performance improvements would certainly be worth it for a NAS system, but then you don't get any sata ports.

Gpio wise you've got a non-standard 2mm pitch header and 1.8V. What a pain.

For me, the lack audio output and WiFi is a bit annoying. A media centre with a only hdmi1.4 would be a problem for some (you'd also maybe have to go for the slower one without a fan).

Also remembering we are comparing a £42 device (I've included the official pi PSU) with a £70 device (+ if we want wifi). So maybe it's better compared against an atom board for those who want to spend a bit more. But an atom gives you sata so if that price comparison is fair (edit: had a quick look, it's not fair), the xu4 isn't that great.

Maybe it is the use as a desktop system where the xu4 shines.

I'm not convinced it's an obvious choice.

XU4 has 18.04 support for like 9 months now:

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=30888

And this you can find with a 30 seconds search online.

> https://www.odroid.co.uk/ is the first result from duckduckgo.

Why would you want to go to a Distributor website to find software/hardware information? It's like looking for a manual on amazon, it's just the wrong place.

It's hardly like that. Sales websites should have accurate info else they don't gave a leg to stand on when you want to return the falsely advertised product.

But I'm going to focus on the actual issue, even their official site gets this wrong and you have to look in the forums. This is a great example of one of problems you get with these other boards.

The hc2 looks very interesting for nas type applications like nextcloud etc. Removing the hdmi and usb 3.0 ports in exchange for a sata port. It'd surely be a lot faster than my old microserver, which arguably I don't need it to be... Frustratingly that UK distributor doesn't stock it. Edit: I tell a lie, they do!

My use case is working with motion vectors from its GPU through picam [0]. Is there an alternative?

[0] https://picamera.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.13/api_array.ht...