The Rock 5B is not a Raspberry Pi killer–yet

Re:The Rock 5B is not a Raspberry Pi killer–yet by rcarmo on Wednesday February 01, 2023 @06:19PM (#34619573)

I’ve been using ARM SBCs for ages now (mostly Pis, but also Hardkernel and a few “alternatives”), and _all_ of them except the Pi have absolutely dismal software support. Armbian does a pretty good job on some alternatives, but until manufacturers ship with _at least as good_ software as the Pi their value proposition is essentially negative unless you have a lot of free time.

And now that the power envelope is closer to a gen 4 Intel (which is trounced by modern Celerons like the n6xxx and n50xx series), the functionality gap is more obvious.

To be fair, though, I think that most people have unrealistic expectations of what low-end SBCs can do as far as “desktop computing” is concerned.

I do use a Pi as a very nice, utterly silent and fast thin client (backed by an i7 in a closet), but if I wanted to run local apps (browser, light office, etc.) I’d just go and get a NUC or an $150 refurbished small form factor desktop (there are great Ryzen boxes with modern mobile APUs from Minisforum and Beelink, but I am extremely wary of their quality control, and the really interesting ones are too expensive to risk it).

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Re:The Rock 5B is not a Raspberry Pi killer–yet by haberman on Wednesday February 01, 2023 @06:26PM (#34619662)

> I am extremely wary of their quality control

I am curious to hear more about this. Do you have bad experiences to share?

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Re:The Rock 5B is not a Raspberry Pi killer–yet by rcarmo on Wednesday February 01, 2023 @06:31PM (#34619713)

I have been monitoring Reddit threads for a few months ever since the 5900x and 6800/6900 APU variants started shipping. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be any mainstream vendors in this space, so you’re essentially dealing with small Chinese companies with no support structure, who have… unusual concepts about board design and cooling, and who manufacture in small batches. The yields on those things are statistically not good in general.

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Re:The Rock 5B is not a Raspberry Pi killer–yet by apple4ever on Thursday February 02, 2023 @08:24PM (#34635917)

> _all_ of them except the Pi have absolutely dismal software support.

That is exactly what I have found.

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