alt Hacker NewsMy 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).
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"Chinese repos" is a very charitable interpretation of the Google drive links they used to distribute the os. It seemed like it was on the free plan too, it often didn't work because it tripped the maximum downloads per month limit.
That's always the problem with these non-Pi SBCs. They never have good software support.
I have this experience with most of these SBC-s. The new Radxa board boots 50% of the time. The only reliable SBCs I have are RPI3|4.
you keep insinuating PRC yet you don't realize you're already pwned just running their hardware no matter the OS.
I opened the review and immediately ctrl-F'd "kernel". It said no upstream support so I closed the article.
I would never buy one of these things without upstream kernel support for the SoC and a sane bootloader. Even the Raspberry Pi is not great on this front TBH (kernel is mostly OK but the fucked up boot chain is a PITA, requires special distro support).