So you can get those compute units are obtainable, but a functioning image remains unobtanium. What a mess.

You can usually get an image that functions at least partially, but it's up to you to determine whether the amount it functions is enough for your use case. A K3s setup is usually good to go without some features like display output.

I like to tinker, but there is a limit.

The killer feature for their go fund would be is if they sourced a batch of pi compute modules ...

I've asked about that. There's a small possibility, but the earliest it would be able to happen (a batch of CM4 to offer as add-ons) would be summer, most likely :(

I don’t think these boards are meant for the way people are trying to use them. Mainline Linux support is actually great on RK3566 chips, but you have to build your own images with buildroot or something like that.

I spent some time last week tinkering with a SOQuartz board and ended up getting it working with a Pine-focused distro called Plebian[1].

Took awhile to land on it though. Before that I tried all of the other distros on Pine64's "SOQuartz Software Releases"[2] page without any luck. The only one on that page that booted was the linked "Armbian Ubuntu Jammy with kernel 5.19.7" but it failed to boot again after an apt upgrade.

So there's at least one working OS, as of last week. But its definitely quite finicky and would probably need some work to build a proper device tree for any carrier board that's not the RPi CM4 Carrier Board.

[1] https://github.com/Plebian-Linux/quartz64-images

[2] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/SOQuartz_Software_Releases