Raspbian works perfectly fine. Most of those other operating systems don’t really have the best GPIO support which is where Raspberry Pi shines. I’d just get a cheap mini pc if I wanted to run something else.

Except the RPi is smaller, lighter, lower power and more efficient than most mini PCs. It also has a bunch of unique addon boards, many (most?) of which don't really use GPIOs, but a standard communication interface like PCIe/USB/serial/SPI/I2C.

No mini PC can beat most things about the Pi, apart from performance and compatibility, the latter of which is fully the fault of the manufacturer.

An arduino board with a esp32 added to it can do a lot of things(minus some cam/image recognition stuff) for half the price.

Rpi is strictly suited to very specific use cases.

I've deployed my fair share of both and SBCs are still a very widely useful middle ground. Being able to use existing Linux tools instead of limited or nonexistent embedded libraries is a huge benefit. Most things to do with sound or video, for example, are totally infeasible with microcontrollers. A mini PC is noticably bigger and you need to add a microcontroller over USB if you need absolutely any real world interaction (even something as simple as sensing ambient light to adjust brightness).

My new favourite tool for these situations is the Radxa X4, which is the exact dimensions of a RPi, but with an Intel x86 CPU and an onboard microcontroller to drive GPIOs.

Yeah rpi does have some real world usage but for many small projects that hobbyists do rpi can be a overkill.

Will checkout the radxa x4 sounds interesting.

RPi dropped the ball relative to the competition. Orange Pi boards outperform them for a fraction of the price. There are very few use-cases where Raspberry is preferable.

I have had an Orange Pi 5 max for about six months, still can't get it to boot with a serial console attached which makes it hard to port any alternative operating systems to it.

Wouldn't that be a uboot issue? Perhaps you could piggy-back on this effort.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OrangePI/comments/1buzts4/uboot_v20...

I think that my problem is similar to this [1]. Have tried more than one USB to serial adaptor with the same result, the adaptors work fine on other boards.

The board boots Armbian fine with nothing connected to the serial port.

[1] https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/issues/1073

I don't think so, it just doesn't power up with the serial cable connected.

I just googled Orange Pi, tried to click on the first result, which is their website. But they have no https site set up, so I got no host. Http works but only on iOS safari, that's a bit weird. Is this CN net weirdness?

I got something similar last year. That was the reminder I needed that software competency actually matters too, and I went with RPi.

Just wait until you try downloading Orange Pi's OS...

I think the RPi 4 is still competitive. At ~40$, Orange Pi's boards are Allwinner H618 and Rockchip RK3566 based boards. I do have an Orange Pi 3B in use because it has an nvme port, but the RPi 4 is generally faster.

The Raspberry Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5 are just too expensive. I do have some of the Pi 5s from both these companies, but have replaced them with Intel N100 mini-PCs instead. But I'll still use RPi 4's for my 3d printers and other lower-end uses.

And RPi's software support is just better: I've got an Orange Pi 4. Orange Pi hasn't updated their OS for it in years. Last time I tried to get it working in Armbian, HDMI output was (is?) broken: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26818-opi-4-lts-no-hdmi-outp...

Orange Pi also has Rockchip RK3588 based boards.

RK35XX only worked well because volunteer maintainers like Joshua Riek were doing hard work, the support of those boards falls when people like him burn out.

For me personally, much of the value of the RPI products is knowing they will have long term support.

RockChip really only appears to care about embedded auto apps etc...thus their support horizon is more about sustainment and not enhancement, and they do little to support the community.

Where can I download the documentation for the BCM2712 in the RPi 5?

I can get this for the RK3588 though there are problems with my Orange Pi board that uses it.

Nothing apart from Raspbian ... and Ubuntu

https://ubuntu.com/certified/202310-32202

we've happily running on routers on the pi5/cm5 since last year (https://www.supernetworks.org) and openwrt support is there as well.

> in fact nothing at all apart from Raspberry Pi OS

How do you figure? E.g. OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Alpine Linux, Kali, and Zephyr all offer official image support. Others have unofficial support, e.g. I think FreeBSD actually falls in this boat.

And if I'm not mistaken even Archlinux ARM should work.

For the Raspberry Pi 4, did they ever release an image you didn't need to chroot into and update before it would boot?

That's "easy" when all they have to do is to package https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux

Zephyr is not Linux, btw.

A lot of linux native software example redshift still does not work on the rpi. Lot of things are broken. Recently i tried to use it as a basic desktop replacement until my new laptop arrives. Does a terrible f job.

A 10 year old celeron n2930 based mini pc i purchased for 30$ at a scrapper performs way better than the pi4. Ran esxi and bunch of vms on top of it aswell. Sips 10 w of power.

I tend to prefer small x86 boxes myself but the discussion here was supposed regressions on the Pi 5's ability to run anything but the official OS, not general dislikes. Similarly, I think the Redshift thing is actually an X11/Wayland debate.

Yeah the redshift thing is related to wayland but shifting to x11 on a pi means you are missing out on certain latest inbuilt software additions to raspian os(on screen keyboards etc dont work well or almost always at all with x11)

And all other os's run terribly on the pi. I tried running ubuntu via a usb nvme drive and it was laggy.

Too underpowered for the price it sells for. I tried streaming some live data on 2 tabs and the pi4(4 gig version) started stuttering.

I used my RP5 as my main machine for the better part of a month. It worked surprisingly well, even with just an SD card.

> A couple of of the operating systems seem to point the finger at poorly documented hardware changes that the manufacturer has been no help with.

If only we could have somehow predicted this. I mean who could have predicted that a company that has never released hardware documentation and screwed over individual users in preference to corporate users during shortages would get in the way of porting other OSes. <shocked Pikachu face>

I mean, it's not like people have been bitching about this for more than a goddamn decade.

If only we could have forseen this <rolls eyes>.

An RPI5 4GB is exactly the same price and form factor as the Beagle Y-AI. You can help the folks trying to do this right or not. The choice is yours.

If there only was a way to boot an OS without having to port said OS to the exact piece of hardware...

It seems the ARM SystemReady stuff is only for big iron.

What does tianocore do for raspberry pi? is it just a shim to add uefi?

Yes; it means you can, for example, install an off-the-shelf copy of Debian. See https://github.com/pftf/RPi4.

In theory, it's a wonderful idea, because it means you can run the same distro on your RPis as on the rest of your fleet (architecture differences notwithstanding), and therefore have consistent patching requirements, etc. In practice, as frustrating as it is that the RPi kernel patches haven't been upstreamed, they exist for a reason and I think by not having them, you're shooting yourself in the foot (even if you only hit a toe or two). Two things I observed recently when directly comparing stock Debian aarch64 with Raspberry Pi OS on an RPi4 was a 40%+ reduction in SD card read performance, and nonfunctional power control of the USB ports.

Fwiw I still have a “poor man's NAS” RPi4 running Debian, and it works great. (The SD card throughput deficiencies don't affect me there because the system boots from a USB-attached SSD.) If you're able to take the time to make a situation-specific assessment of what works (and what works “well enough”) vs. what doesn't, then in the long term, you can reap the benefits of not having to remember how to handle a single oddball OS in your fleet (especially given RPi OS' particularly consumer-oriented whims).

Yes, it is. And that in turn enables fairly simple installation of NetBSD and suchlike, which have ARM ports that know how to talk to and layer themselves on top of EFI firmware.

An interesting further little feature of TianoCore particularly for Pi 4 users is that it maintains a fake hardware clock. It only ticks forward when the firmware is in boot services mode; it is persisted to the firmware's own image file in the EFI System Partition; and it isn't as effective as even a simple fake-hwclock utility. But it does satisfy the operating systems that assume that there must be a hardware clock, because every computer is PC98-compatible.

I’ve noticed most of the replies to your comment address the first half, and none (as of right now) address the second:

> So the question that comes to my mind is whether this is yet further new and different Raspberry Pi 5 hardware that comes with no software or prospect of software.

If by “this” you mean the MicroSD Express hat from the article: this is a hobby project produced by a hobbyist, who seems to have no plans to sell or mass produce it.

It is unfair to the creator for you to lump it in with, and draw a conclusion from, the works produced by Raspberry Pi Holdings.