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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?

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

> 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.

Suspend / resume? I'll settle for "keyboard works".

(From what I've learned so far, some magic incantation is required to convince Linux that a Lifebook E559 is a laptop not a tablet. I'm finding I have way less patience with these side-quests as I get older.)

That laptop has an 8th gen Intel processor which should make it completely compatible with the Linux kernel, yet surprisingly it’s not. https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=2ec391ffdc Did Fujitsu choose an obscure component or interface?

Even on random ARM boards, it's not usually the CPU that's the problem. (It's generally drivers for everything else; eg. a sensor hub that should tell you when a laptop is in tablet mode)

Yeah, my implication was that the 8th gen CPU's platform controller hub should be supported. I should have explicitly rather than implicitly stated that.

> I'm finding I have way less patience with these side-quests as I get older.

Yup, i’m in the same boat. I’m so tempted to get one of the new macbooks and call it a day.

Interesting: Despite its name Armbian seems to support RISC-V.

Disclaimer: I have never used any RISC-V board.

In addition to https://armbian.com one could also cross check with Diet-Pi, which got resurrected from dormancy sometime in the last years.

https://dietpi.com

I frequently come across comments from people who think raspberry pis are overpriced and you are better off buying from one of the numerous Chinese SBCs with better bang for the buck. Your comment is why these people are often wrong.

Most of those SBCs have very poor software support. You will often need to go on GitHub or the manufactuer's support website to hunt down an OS image that hopefully works. If you want to stay up to date, tough luck. You will be lucky if your board is still receiving updates two years after release.

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. Even the Pi 1 model B+ which is over ten years old still receives updates, and will continue to do so until at least 2030.

Unless reviewing and playing with random boards is your hobby or job, in which case more power to you and thank you for providing valuable information to the community, you are likely better off buying a boring raspi so you can just get things done.

> Your comment is why these people are often wrong.

Interestingly, it’s the opposite for me, and I almost exclusively see comments about software support & linux mainlaine.

That said, I think 90% of the time it’s better to buy small x86 machine than a PI. Those have great software support, are more powerful, and can be cheaper (slightly larger & no GPIO, those two are the main reasons to go SBC)

The difference is between x64 machines and ARM machines. The no-name x64 machines have excellent software support because they all run EFI and have fairly ordinary hardware. The no-name ARM boards have cobbled together bootloaders and require specific U-Boot magic most of the time to even get them online.

> 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).

I don't think RPi is the gold standard nor is Chinese production that strongly correlated with poor SW support?

Raspberry Pi usually requires customisation from the distro. This is mitigated by the fact that many distros have done that customisation but the platform itself is not well-designed for SW support.

Meanwhile many Allwinner and Rockchip platforms have great mainline support. While Qualcomm is apparently moving in the right direction but historically there have been lots of Qualcomm SBCs where the software support is just a BSP tarball on a fixed Linux kernel.

So yeah I do agree with your conclusion but it's not as simple as "RPi has the best software support and don't buy Chinese". You have to look into it on a case by case basis.

I would second this. For SBCs the software support is the biggest deal breaker for me these days. Being cheaper or more powerful isn't as much of a benefit without the software ecosystem and community to back it up.

And then the construction quality/tolerance too. I've had Pis last for years and then cheap alternatives burn out after a few months of moderate use.

This comment made me think that RPi is almost like a Windows laptop where the windows license price is baked in. But here is the price of constant maintenance of Raspbian and just drivers in general

Do you still have to pay for a license to use the hardware codec on the RPi boards?

To be fair, this also applies to Nvidia and the Jetson line of products.

Otoh RPi relies on completely custom proprietary boot chain, while many Rockchip devices can be booted with standard uboot

> go on GitHub or the manufactuer's support website to hunt down an OS image

If you're lucky! Most of the time it's a questionable Google Drive link.

The Chinese understand that everyone will be burned once and then never again(hopefully). Thats still millions of dollars in their pockets and not yours. There is a sucker born every minute attracted by the low prices expecting these things to work just like Raspberry pi. I got burned on the Cubieboard 1 in 2012. Still have that junk somewhere in the house having never run any major applications on the device.

I wonder if AI can help bridge the gap and provide the missing support that these vendors don't wish to provide.

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.

I'm really curious what will happen to this space when Valve releases great open source drivers for the Qualcomm chip they have in the Steam Frame. It might be one of the first, very powerful, GPU accelerated SoC you can buy that has mainline support.

I can image having a very usable ARM linux laptop and tablet as a result of this — maybe even cellphone when the modems get mainlined or used via USB.

I've worked with many boards from many vendors for many years now...

If you need software to be available in 2, 3, 5 years, get a raspberry pi.

Some might have some software available, some might have patches, some may need manual compiling, some only support debian with 2.4 kernel, some have binary blobs that only work on that 2.4 kernel, some have working usb ports on 2.4 and no gpio, but working gpio with 2.6 kernel but no usb ports, etc.

Just get a raspberry pi.

I’d go a step further and say get a mini pc unless you need gpio

With a miniPC you can always use a Raspberry Pico (or Arduino that supports Device Mode) for your GPIOs.

raspberry pi have some of the worst power management and usage of any SBCs. theyre a non starter for an entire class of projects (battery powered). so no. dont just get a pi. do 5 minutes of research.

btw, i have inherited projects that used raspberry pis for the computing. every single one had to be reworked replacing the pi.

additionally, if the pi doesnt fit your RF footprint needs in an enclosure, it is not possible to get the chips standalone. plus the schematic is not open source. fuck broadcom and fuck raspberry pi foundation. acceptable for light hobby use only

So what other board can I buy today, put in a drawer for 5 years, maybe 10, take it out then and still find a modern linux distro with a modern kernel for it? RPi 1 still has debian stable support.

Same here. I really wanted Orange Pi to work, tried, but after getting my raspberry pi 4 it's night and day.

Let me answer that for you: No, no, and yes (to the second part). Anything else?

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.

0: https://community.ui.com/questions/What-is-the-max-performan...

I'm curious why you don't like OpenWRT?

I've found it to be the better choice for x86 hardware, because it performs so much better on older CPUs. FreeBSD has gotten better with driver support, but the Linux kernel in OWRT is just a better base to build off of.

not GP but I've found the install and upgrade experience for OpenWRT on larger machines is not great compared to the alternatives and normal Linux distros, everything is biased towards the use case of occasionally flashing/configuring little systems

I still use it though, can't complain in terms of actual routing/switching

I think OPNsense now supports ARM.

Edit: never mind. Not official images.

> ollama benchmark ... for now, it's purely CPU, with DeepSeek R1 models tested based on the RAM available.

Then the results aren't comparable across different boards across RAM sizes. It'd be better to test a set of different model sizes on all and report -- if it didn't fit. But could you report the full ollama model name and version size slug for each?

> I pull Jeff's fork of the ollama-benchmark software

A link would be nice.

Hmm, I'm not sure if I'm missing something but that 1st comment is what I'm doing. I have 3 different sized Deepseek R1 models (1.5, 8, 16) and they run on each board that can handle them and then the data is reported.

For the 2nd, the file I grabbed initially was https://github.com/geerlingguy/ai-benchmarks/blob/main/obenc... - which I now notice wasn't modified in his repository, so I can check that out, but either way, the same version has been tested across everything thus far.

I find it really weird that it's not until you get to the $200 range that anything has USB-C DP Alt mode support. You'd have though that anyone trying to squeeze space would want to drop full-size HDMI or DisplayPort ports at the first opportunity.

I really want a small SBC with USB-C DP Alt mode that I can stuff into a ~60%ish mechanical keyboard-sized case to make into a headless laptop thing so I can justify buying some display glasses like the XReal One or similar. Seems like it would be the ultimate travel computing solution.

I switched from SBC to thin clients. You get the Dell wyse 5070 for 50 euros in my country and it has USB c dp alt mode and much more.

I will note that in theory there's the Radxa Cubie A7S, but that's unobtainium. Or I'd have bought three by now.

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?

The Radxa Orion O6 is a really nice ARMv9.2 ITX board, and supports UEFI boot. Installation of Debian trixie using Debian's vanilla installation media went flawlessly, and it's been running fine for 6 months now.

Do the peripherals work reliably? Wifi and GPIO especially. It does seem like a very capable board but this is always so hit and miss.

I can't really say as I don't use them. This is a host mostly working as a CI worker connected via ethernet.

I just scanned for WiFi networks and that worked fine. I also see that GPIO is not enabled for CIXP1 devices in Debian's kernel; I'll ask the kernel team to enable it.

RK3588 is well supported right now and is present in many SBCs

I am generally happy with my Orange Pi 5, but I have flip flopped between the vendor kernel and a mainline kernel depending on what purpose the OPi5 is serving at that moment.

There’s also a fairly usable UEFI implementation.

Does the vendor kernel support more of the board's peripherals than the mainline kernel?

Had that issue with some Odroid boards, where the vendor kernel supported MFC hardware acceleration but the vanilla kernel didn't/doesn't. I'd like to avoid that

Yes, that’s the main reason to run the vendor kernel. Mainline support is improving all the time though.

I believe I needed the vendor kernel to use video through the USB-C port, and to use the HW acceleration for transcoding in Jellyfin. This situation may have changed since my last attempts.

I think https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35... is still the best reference for mainline support of the RK3588. As you say, DP alt mode and video encoding are totally unsupported right now. Hopefully things will keep progressing; it's a very feature-rich platform, and I think it will have some legs even after it is no longer the compute king (e.g., the RK3688 is on the horizon).

Libre Computer makes a range of SBCs and supports mainline Linux. I use their products, and I'm very happy with them.

"Most ARM single board computers depend on proprietary binary blobs to boot or ship with outdated vendor kernels that are never upstreamed and quickly abandoned. Libre Computer takes a different approach: we fund and contribute to the mainline Linux kernel and U-Boot directly, ensuring our platforms run on upstream open-source software with minimal proprietary firmware."

https://libre.computer/

Yup, seconded! Libre Computer do a great job on this front

Budget boards start at $42? Not really sure what the criteria was for being included, but it looks like you can still get a RPi 2B for $25. And Orange Pis are available for under $20.

please make llm.cpp benchmark on this same model

"This one caught me off guard. Arduino, the company most of us associate with microcontrollers and blinking LEDs, have released an SBC."

Uh, what were they doing before? No, seriously, given that every laptop ever and most legacy free desktops, not to speak of the 1U servers you find in data centers use a single PCB, what makes a SBC a SBC?

I've seen Raspberry Pi and the like being referred to as 'open frame computers', which I thought describes them more fittingly.

If I stripped my old laptop down to a single PCB, it certainly wouldn't boot, it would be missing RAM, and storage. My PCs would have no RAM, no CPU, no storage, potentially no GPU, and most of the servers would be the same. The IPMI/iDRAC etc would boot up I guess if we count that, and we'd potentially get into the BIOS if a device has soldered RAM, but M.2/SATA attached storage or something?

We could debate about strict definitions all day, but I think the vast majority of people differentiate between a Raspberry Pi 5 (not a great example given it needs storage, pick anything with eMMC if you truly want everything on a single board) running a full Debian-based OS, and a Pico running MicroPython (or whatever your poison of choice is) and one task at a time, at least I do when it comes to this kind of thing!

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.

It would be better if there was a table summarized it all.

What kind of summary are you realistically looking for/expecting in an article like this? (Genuine question, no sass!)

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!

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!

I hadn't seen your site before (or been following SBC for a while) and just skimmed the article and was going to move on. (The post was very cool.)

It wasn't until this thread that I actually clicked through to the sbc.compare. I saw you complement the CIX P1 and Qualcomm in the post but it took looking at the Geekbench numbers on sbc.compare to understand the magnitude of the situation.

(I guess I'm saying the table might've helped me. But I still appreciate the post as is.)

The balancing of wanting to draw attention to sbc.compare and allow the post to stand on its own feet has failed it seems :D No worries, the feedback is good and I'll see if I get time to go back and add a summary for this, otherwise, I'll definitely take it on board for the next one(s).

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.

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!

Yeah, the Pi has a very interesting looking mini-screen addon too.

https://www.waveshare.com/product/cm4-disp-base-2.8a.htm

I think being able to switch between a phone and desktop is a great use-case for SBC. Important to be able to attach a power bank and the real bottleneck to adoption: a telco addon.

Some sort of vibration absorbing case would also be great with a few different varieties around too: https://www.gttwireless.com/raspberry-pi-outdoors/ https://github.com/NebraLtd/IP67-Enclosure

You could take that SBC with you on a bike, car, around the home, to the worksite. Even a mobile web server for temporary gatherings placed on a high vantage point. Signage is also an important area for SBCs.

I'd wager on Polymarket that Apple will end up doing something in this space.

We posted that at the same time!!

Rpi and also nvidia jetson I would add.

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