I really wish these lists would talk about software support. If I buy these, do they have mainline Linux support? Will I have security patches in a year? Is there decent distro support, or am I stuck with the vendor's half broken default image?
sthlmb 56 minutes ago [-]
Hey! Author of the post someone linked here. Fair comment, though this wasn't really meant to be a review, or "go buy this!" type of post, it was more to highlight what I tested from the boards released in 2025 and share the results to those benchmarks via sbc.compare
Armbian do a great job of handling support for a whole host of boards (including most I included in this list), so you'll usually have Debian/Ubuntu-based flavours. Vendor kernels and vendor supplied images will be hit and miss. Mainline Linux support is a flag you filter by on the benchmark comparison site linked in the article, but it's a difficult one to keep up to date and define exactly. It could have some kind of support, but miss out on display functionality, or WiFi yada yada. What would we then class as having mainline support? All hardware etc functioning? If so, very, very few will meet that definition.
I get the desire for the information, and perhaps I should have envisioned these types of questions, but all I initially meant for the post to be was a recap for people following me to see which boards I'd tested that were released last year :D
fn-mote 23 minutes ago [-]
> All hardware etc functioning?
If your standard is "supports suspend/resume", there's even plenty of laptops that won't meet it.
That gave me a laugh.
LargoLasskhyfv 20 minutes ago [-]
In addition to https://armbian.com one could also cross check with Diet-Pi, which got resurrected from dormancy sometime in the last years.
Yes, software support is what kills projects for me. I have been burned on boards with terrible support before. No documentation and some Linux kernel patched by someone on crack. Usually the Chinese comments in the patches are a dead giveaway of where the software originated from.
heavyset_go 1 hours ago [-]
I basically stopped buying SBCs several years ago, are there any SoC platforms that have mainline Linux support these days? Or is x86 still the way to go?
aarroyoc 1 hours ago [-]
RK3588 is well supported right now and is present in many SBCs
tripdout 1 hours ago [-]
The BPI-R4 is great for use as a 10G WAN router if your ISP uses PPPoE since the network processing engine has hardware acceleration for it.
Unifi released the UCG-Fiber around a year ago that can also apparently finally handle it, but plenty of threads about slow performance with their UDMs since it's entirely done on the CPU [0].
I'm not the biggest fan of OpenWRT and would prefer something like OPNSense, but it's x86 only and good PPPoE performance isn't guaranteed either - need a CPU with good single core performance that costs more than the BPI-R4, or apparently virtualizing OPNSense allows it to process PPPoE with multiple threads.
It would be better if there was a table summarized it all.
sthlmb 40 minutes ago [-]
What kind of summary are you realistically looking for/expecting in an article like this? (Genuine question, no sass!)
tamimio 25 minutes ago [-]
A table or similar where it lists the maker, cost, board name, ram, soc, arch, and maybe other columns like high end/low/budget friendly, and size form factor.
That would be helpful before you dive into the details, for example, I build drones, and seeing nvidia Xavier specs I would be thrilled about it until I see its size and power consumption. Great article btw!
sthlmb 20 minutes ago [-]
Thanks! See my reply below to the other user on this, I think the links to sbc.compare in the article have a lot of the data that you're looking for. I didn't really want to duplicate all of the data I have on the other site, I was more giving a quick recap, with links to the mass of data if people wanted to go that far. Some you mentioned like the dimensions are in the database, but I've not yet exposed them to the frontend.. Ever growing to-do list of life!
IshKebab 27 minutes ago [-]
Price, CPU performance, RAM, storage, networking, software support outlook.
I mean really though unless you have a lot of time I don't think there's anything close to worth leaving the software support of Raspberry Pi for.
sthlmb 22 minutes ago [-]
For that I'd really point you towards the links in the article, as that was really what it was supposed to do :D As I mentioned to another person in the comments, this was literally supposed to be a recap of the boards I tested, with links to in-depth benchmark results for each of the boards, with the ability to then filter and compare against around 100 other SBCs that I own and have tested in a controlled manner. Software support is a very tricky one though, sadly. I have a few ideas for little things like being able to search for Armbian support, but others would need a long hard think!
tamimio 23 minutes ago [-]
We posted that at the same time!!
Rpi and also nvidia jetson I would add.
plagiarist 55 minutes ago [-]
I wish comparisons would get into whether or not drivers have been upstreamed far enough where it is possible to run real Linux distros. And whether or not they've made braindead choices about boot device ordering.
veegee 5 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 22:43:43 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Armbian do a great job of handling support for a whole host of boards (including most I included in this list), so you'll usually have Debian/Ubuntu-based flavours. Vendor kernels and vendor supplied images will be hit and miss. Mainline Linux support is a flag you filter by on the benchmark comparison site linked in the article, but it's a difficult one to keep up to date and define exactly. It could have some kind of support, but miss out on display functionality, or WiFi yada yada. What would we then class as having mainline support? All hardware etc functioning? If so, very, very few will meet that definition.
I get the desire for the information, and perhaps I should have envisioned these types of questions, but all I initially meant for the post to be was a recap for people following me to see which boards I'd tested that were released last year :D
If your standard is "supports suspend/resume", there's even plenty of laptops that won't meet it.
That gave me a laugh.
https://dietpi.com
Unifi released the UCG-Fiber around a year ago that can also apparently finally handle it, but plenty of threads about slow performance with their UDMs since it's entirely done on the CPU [0].
I'm not the biggest fan of OpenWRT and would prefer something like OPNSense, but it's x86 only and good PPPoE performance isn't guaranteed either - need a CPU with good single core performance that costs more than the BPI-R4, or apparently virtualizing OPNSense allows it to process PPPoE with multiple threads.
0: https://community.ui.com/questions/What-is-the-max-performan...
That would be helpful before you dive into the details, for example, I build drones, and seeing nvidia Xavier specs I would be thrilled about it until I see its size and power consumption. Great article btw!
I mean really though unless you have a lot of time I don't think there's anything close to worth leaving the software support of Raspberry Pi for.
Rpi and also nvidia jetson I would add.