This thing is obviously designed as RPi 4B drop-in replacement hardware-wise, isn’t it? Judging by the pictures there’s only two problems:
- SoC position differs. But not that much so with some copper shims or a thermal pad it should be possible to even make use of those metal RPi 4 enclosures that passively dissipate the heat out of the enclosure via a huge Aluminium block reaching down to the SoC. TBC
- the position of the SD card slot on the bottom looks off by a little, not perfectly centered
So if that was the design idea how should Radxa not copy the position of each and every connector as closely as possible?
As for ‘the good things’ or ‘great software support’ as you call it… what should Radxa do here? Today and within the next years there’s just a smelly Rockchip BSP kernel forward ported since ages containing lots of unresolved bugs and vulnerabilities making use of all the hardware features.
And then there’s the ongoing effort by volunteers and Collabora (a software contractor in the embedded world) to support as much of the hardware as possible with ‘latest and greatest’ Linux mainline kernel. Let’s see in half a decade what has happened…
The distribution (Arch, Debian, Manjaro, Ubuntu, whatever) doesn’t matter since the only part that matters is the kernel and the accompanying libs (for e.g. graphics/video acceleration). And this is the same on every OS image that will fly around for Rock 5A (or to be more precise: for any RK3588/RK3588S device since they’re all the same software-wise) today and within the next months/years.