OrangePi 6 Plus Review

My experience with the OrangePi 4 LTS has been poor, and I'm unwilling to purchase more of their hardware. Mine is now running Armbian because I didn't care for the instability, or for the Chinese repos.

They seem uninterested in trying to get their hardware supported by submitting their patches for inclusion in the Linux kernel, and popular distros. Instead, you have to trust their repos (based in PRC).

The review shows ARM64 software support is still painful vs x86. For $200 for the 16gb model, this is the price point where you could just get an Intel N150 mini PC in the same form factor. And those usually come with cases. They also tend to pull 5-8w at idle, while this is 15w. Cool if you really want ARM64, but at this end of the performance spectrum, why not stick with the x86 stack where everything just works a lot easier?

We need an acronym for these types of boards: Yet Another SBC With Poor Longterm Support. YASBCWPLS. Really rolls off the tongue.

Or we should just have "STS" (Short Term Support) after the board names to let others know the board will be essentially obsolete (based on lack of software updates) in two months.

Without mainline Linux support I have no interest in these more obscure SBCs. Mainline Linux is the bare minimum, put in some effort please manufacturers.

Buying one of these Pi knockoffs taught me one thing, software support is the key to raspberry pi’s success.

Whenever I would have a problem, and it was more often than not, I would search for a solution and come across something that worked for rpi that I could try to port across.

Double the hardware spec matters little if you can’t get the software to even compile

I'm not sure I'm gonna grab another OrangePi board again. I was happy to grab the RV2 just to experiment around with, but I didn't realize that the linux kernel they provided to build their ubuntu distro doesn't actually build properly. I got it to build after throwing a version of ubuntu onto an unused pc, but then it didn't matter the options I selected for the build (like gui options) it seemed like the gui just didn't exist at all in the final binary. I've yet to try and build a 3rd party os with support since I spent so much time just trying to get the official distro to work properly.

When something has an 30 TOPS NPU, what are the implications? Do NPUs like this have some common backend that ggml/llama.cpp targets? Is it proprietary and only works for some specific software? Does it have access to all the system RAM and at what bandwidth?

I know the concept has been around for a while but no idea if it actually means anything. I assume that people are targeting ones in common devices like Apple, but what about here?

e-*ing-waste if you have to wait for manufacturer to provide supported images.

Upstream the drivers to the mainline kernel or go bankrupt. Nobody should buy these.

I think the sweet spot for ARM SBCs are smaller, less powerful and cheaper for headless IOT edge cases. I use a couple of them that way when I need LAN connectivity, either by ethernet or wifi, and things wired to GPIO pins. I don't need a powerful CPU or lots of RAM for that. The SBC makers are caught up in a horsepower race and I just shrug, it's not for me.

Unfortunately, this board seems to be using the CIX CPU that has power management issues:

> 15W at idle, which is fairly high

My Orange Pi RV2 sucks :( The available distros, drivers, kernel, and tools do work, but they’re crappy, and poorly maintained. There’s no support and very little documentation, which is a real shame. From a hardware point of view, it’s a nice board and when I properly compiled some softwares myself I actually got really interesting performance, but it was a pain in the ass. So I ended up buying a Raspberry Pi 4, much better supported and documented.

Their approach to software support does leave a lot to be desired.

For what it's worth though the v5 did have Talos support, so you could just throw that on there, connect it to a cluster and have a decent arm node that is fanless and has 32gb

https://docs.siderolabs.com/talos/v1.12/platform-specific-in...

I have a software that need to build aarch64 (for some aarch64 box with 4 core cpu), currently using Oracle cloud's 4core24G Arm neoverse n1 as github self host runner to build it.

Seems this machine is more powerful than it, definitely attractive to me for a physical aarch64 self host runner.

I am newly interested in Compute Module style SBCs after I bought a one to toy around with. I was surprised to learn that the PCBs that interface to them are open specs and I can probably build myself more custom PCB solutions to match different form factors instead of being stuck with a bulky normal Raspberry Pi.

I was pleased to learn that Radxa and Orange Pi have compatible similar boards.

I have wanted to see more RISC SBCs so I may toy with these but I rather wait for the software support to get much richer.

I am not a kernel developer, so I don't really have any idea what this means, but CIX appears to have patches in the Linux kernel[0], so I assume mainlining more stuff is in the works?

[0] https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250609031627.1605851-1-peter.chen@c...

I thought the /. effect was to hug a site to death, not cause the price of the product under review to skyrocket. I see $414 instead of $258 now!

Is the orangePi 6 plus really almost 4x as fast as an intel n100?

i really with raspberry pi foundation released a pi with built in nvme instead of using a hat. i think using flash memory is the true bottleneck on the system

Weird article: it compares with raspberry pi 5 instead of OrangePi 5 Plus, the predecessor.

> at the beginning, my OrangePi did not boot ... Turns out that the firmware required an update to be able to boot

No thanks.

Wow this website just keep crashing my firefox, like 3 times in a row

Cool. Somebody put it in a laptop please.

Does uboot work on this?

Yet another board which will never have proper upstream support because the SoC vendor refused to implement the ARM BSA standard which would provide EFI/ACPI support instead of relying on undiscoverable devices only exposed through device tree. ACPI isn't perfect but it's way better than device trees which are seldom updated so the device will remain stuck with old kernels.

How are we still in a world where there are breathless, hand-waving blog posts written about the theoretical potential of super-fast SBCs for which the manufacturer shows fuck all interest in competent OS support?

Yet again, OrangePi crank out half-baked products and tech enthusiasts who quite understandably lack the deep knowledge to do more than follow others' instructions on how to compile stuff talk about it as if their specifications actually matter.

Yet again the HN discourse will likely gather around stuff like "why not just use an N1x0" and side quests about how the Raspberry Pi Foundation has abandoned its principles / is just a cynical Broadcom psyop / is "lagging behind" in hardware.

This stuff can be done better and the geek world should be done excusing OrangePi producing hardware abandonware time after time. Stop buying this crap and maybe they will finally start focussing on doing more than shipping support for one or two old kernels and last year's OS while kicking vague commitments about future support just far enough down the road that they can release another board first.

Please stop falling for it :-/

ETA: I think what grinds my gears the most is that OrangePi, BananaPi etc., are largely free-riding off the Linux community while producing products that only "beat" the market-defining manufacturers (Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard) because they treat software support as an uncosted externality.

This kind of "build it and they will use it" logic works well for microcontrollers, where a manufacturer can reasonably expect to produce a chip with a couple of tech demos, a spec sheet and a limited C SDK and people will find uses for it.

But for "near-desktop class" SBCs it is not much better than misrepresentation. Consequently these things are e-waste in a way that even the global desk drawer population of the Raspberry Pi does not reach.

And yet they are graded on a curve and never live up to their potential.

Prices are considerably higher through the links than quoted in the article. This usually happens when someone posts about a great deal for surplus hardware on Ebay or a hidden gem on aliexpress. Just the thundering herd of traffic causes algorithmic pricing to spike the price.

I have the itx board from radxa. This CIX chip is a disappointment, you'll never see the 2.8ghz.

Why bother with these obscure boards with spotty software support when you can get a better deal all around with an x86 mini PC with a N150 CPU?

The half baked hardware comments are humerous, because pretty much any piece of software is half baked if we are lucky.