alt Hacker News> In the meanwhile in raspberry pi land, you can just go to download a reasonably new OS image from their website anytime you want and it will run on all their models.
Are you saying that even with the Raspberry Pi we are still at the mercy of the hardware manufacturer when it comes to OS images?
I mean, nothing stops you from taking the device tree from raspbian and tinkering with other distros. But that's true for most other boards since they have to ship a device tree with their official image.
Raspberry Pi supports their images long term however, so you won't have to do that anytime soon.
Another benefit of raspberry pi is its popularity, there are just more projects out there compared to less known SBC manufacturers. Iirc the Archlinux arm project have images for the raspberry pi 4 (maybe 5).