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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I guess for that Armbian is totally enough. Or even the ONLY use case that Armbian works for.
Yes. It does. Fully and completely. Both embedded and desktop. CSI works, DSI works, all GPIO works, and hardware video acceleration works (including encoders and decoders). Sure, it needs some adjustments sometimes, but the difference is infinite compared to Armbian.
I can see how it works well enough for your particular use case. But for embedded use cases its functionality is exactly equal to 0. Without you developing your own support from the ground up, there’s literally no features at all.
The issue is that they call themselves “perfect” and “excellent” straight on their main page on their website. They are not. They should call themselves “barely working, but working”.
Meaning? The performance is much worse than on Joshua’s Ubuntu. And even if it wasn’t, there are visual glitches when it comes to video output 100% of the time in my experience (dead outputs, color fringing, scaling issues, wrong refresh rate detection, stuttering).
True. But their arrogance, narcissism, extreme rudeness and gate-keeping just rubs me the wrong way. And they dare call themselves saints? If they have no money, they should just stop or close everything and make a private dev repo instead of making demands to worship them.
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No, they don’t call themself that, they talk here about whole idea. Armbian is mainly build system, not any particular release that of course have some bugs and own issues. It’s framework to build customized image with features that You may need across various soc, board manufacturers and userspaces. Like any other software it will have bugs and yes, some images will be broken, but it’s also some reference and possibility for change.
It may be barely working on some params, but still worth to try. With more funds some bugs will be fixed.
As Armbian is build framework it let’s You quickly jump into development and there is for sure significant group of users who builds images with initial support for such use cases, contributing patches and helping to fix bugs on many sbcs. This helps everybody to get final image with working drivers.
Joshua (@Spooky) have done great job with his ubuntu images and he optimized that to get best results. But at same time he worked only on 35xx and very limited options, this is far easier to test and maintain. Armbian is for sure bigger idea and option to create dev image that will help to develop something.
Maybe we will see new releases of Joshua ubuntu.
Calm down, You are not force anyhow to use it, others may find it really useful, even if some images are broken. Try to not get into any flame wars. I think that team perfectly understand their position. Money are always helpful and some big project like wiki also asks about that. Nothing unusual 
That’s not what they say when they puff up their feathers with every new release and your whole argument around that fact could be undermined by reading release posts for no more than 3 minutes.
100% rate of “broken” in my case tho. Not saying it out of spite, but out of real, true, honest experience.
Nah. I will NEVER ever miss a chance to hate on Armbian and everything it stands for. I’m done playing a kind and understanding person everywhere I go (nobody acts kind and understanding irl anyway). No matter how skilled those people are and how well they mean, narcissism, arrogance, rudeness and gate-keeping are absolutely unacceptable. I still remember trying to ask them on the forum about something a few years ago and literally being shit on and spat on multiple times by multiple people. They do shitty work and demand the community to kiss their asses as a thank you. But they don’t realize one thing… Their martyrdom complex is their own problem and they should deal with it all by themselves.
With such attitude You will be judged no more or less like You described.
There is never any point for pure hate, if You can’t find anything good about it - just ignore everything about it. I have seen many failed builds there, but still it’s some alternative, some stub to try. Just like radxa releases orion as dev board to allow people to test it so it can be improved it’s same for Armbian - they give some alternative. There is really nothing wrong with that.
Of course Armbian made some mistakes, their communication will not help to bring developers as well as some advanced users who may help with tests and other stuff. And there is quite big amount of money behind everything there for sure. People needs to eat and time is their currency. Hopefully project will remain as some alternative (it always great to have that) and it would be valuable player in this role.
For now just calm down Fork it to see if You are able to fix anything on Your own. Or just use any alternative that is available.