Am I right in thinking that my purchase of the Rock 5A board was a tragic error… ?
No new version of the operating system for it, no fixes, nothing…
I should have bought the 5B… but now is too late…
Ermeneuta
Rock 5A... a dead end?
Armbian is being updated constantly, no point in counting on the vendor distros. 5A is a great board, quite power efficient.
Useless. Except for when the only two things you need are USB and Ethernet. No other functionality.
Hmm, let me see… GPU acceleration? Works. Vulkan on GPU? Works. Hardware video playback, encoding, transcoding? Works. NPU? also works; sound output as well. Totally useless!
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have u tried kwankius arch installer?
This sounds like desktop usage, but You missed important part - related to gpio and overlays. I did not tested much there, but as far as I remember at least sata overlay failed.
5A for sure it’s not dead and as always vendor builds are based on rockchip releases. Armbian seems to target mostly desktop and video stuff and this is great for most home users/enthusiasts.
That’s not even true. The desktop environment in all Armbians totally sucks. It’s unusable basically, and unstable. Never works smoothly. Always has major issues with scaling. And dual HDMI breaks a lot.
Why they didn’t just make an Ubuntu fork like Joshua did is still a mystery for me.
Stuttery, buggy, ugly, unstable, bad performance, scaling issues, color fringing.
My 1440p 144 Hz monitor NEVER gets detected properly (it either goes to FHD or 4K 59.98 Hz). Chromium crashes or stutters constantly. No amount of tinkering with the settings helps.
Armbian is purely a build system. It’s not a distro and it doesn’t EVER work. And before you start saying words like “hard work” and “mainline” - nobody cares.
Exactly. Not a single “embedded” feature works. No GPIO, no comm buses, no CSI or DSI support whatsoever. If the users have to DIY the support for literally everything themselves, I don’t even see the point of them releasing Armbian as a distro at all.
I’m not an Armbian apologist, it has a lot of problems, but at least it mostly works. Never had any of the issues that you listed. “Ugly” is a subjective thing, I don’t like Armbian’s choice of default software but this is quite irrelevant if one can build their own image.
I don’t have any 1440p displays to test but many displays have issues on many boards and it doesn’t seem unique to 5A.
As long as you don’t need any ‘embedded’ features at all, then maybe. There’s not even UART and I2C available.
Radxa’s images have no issues in that department though in my experience.
Most of the time Armbian doesn’t even boot anyway… Ah, no matter.
Like always it comes without any promises and price, if You have anything better - then just go with that. Armbian was never perfect, but has it’s own advantages. For sure they put lot of effort to get 3d acceleration to work on some sbcs (that’s why I mentioned desktop). Their build system is interesting idea and useful to test few things, apply patches, automatize stuff.
They just have no funds to check everything from specs, it’s just hard and expensive work, so new versions come as they are. You are not forced to use them, maybe vendor image is better for You and has right set of needed functionalities.
My use case is strictly headless compute. Does Joshua’s distro satisfy your embedded requirements? Curious since I have some embedded projects coming up and Armbian is currently working out great for me.
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