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).
so what would you recommend for arm which has good proper support.
I feel like rasp pi has the most community support for everything so I had the intution that most things would just work out of the box on it or it would have the best arm support (I assumed the boot chain to be that as well)
what do you mean by the boot chain being painful to work with and can you provide me some examples perhaps?