The failure of RockPi and every other SBC out there

#21

Just wondering, how are you not contradicting yourself in this paragraph? “If I am lucky I get Armbian” but yet “there is no failure”?

The fact that Ubuntu has now officially released their own images with LTS, IMHO it’s going to decimate a lot of other boards’ marketshare. I switched my Pi’s to official Ubuntu and it’s just so much better, no ancient/“special” packages, no weird/old kernel versions, fast mirrors I can download updates from, I can report issues straight to upstream and I won’t get a “we don’t have the time”-reply (understandable, but annoying nonetheless). It’s really a breath of fresh air compared to Raspbian or Armbian.

I now realize how tremendously software support really affects the UX of using a SBC.

Seeing claims that poor support is because of “the community” or lack thereof is frankly somewhat BS. Until the OEMs start providing the community the datasheets of what they’ve put on the boards it’s simply not possible to utilize hardware properly if all we’ve got are some binary blobs, like on Android phones (e.g. OrangePi et al.). It takes cooperation, not one side doing it all.

#22

Pi came out open source was new and attraced a large herd largely due to stated educational intensions.
It has a large herd, sells in such numbers it gains traction.
OEMs do release datasheets but the binary blobs where nothing to do with RockChip or Radxa it was Arm IP with the Mali that was the main crux of the RK3399 and Arm blobs no reverse engineered in Mesa.

Same with Raspbian and VC4 which still has a team trying to reverse engineer which is almost a decade of BS, whilst ubuntu is completely reliant on their firmware.
The LTS for the Pi4 likely will be 22.04 so enjoy when its released.

No there is no contradiction in saying with the resources they have and stellar results they produce you are lucky when you get a dedicated team like Armbian chipping away at a small much more obscure product.

Its all numbers and sales and if you can not understand that simple analogy that is not much point furthering a discussion.

#23

I guess you never saw Armbian from close? There are areas where Ubuntu can’t match and it will stay that way. Armbian was always up to date with best possible upstream kernel plus many additional fixes that sometimes needs years to reach places where Ubuntu downloads material.

Old kernels are still here because there is no support for all functions in a modern kernels that Ubuntu has nothing to do with, but you should know that ?

Why Ubuntu official support came years later? Because support is cheap enough to run their copy/paste engines.

Armbian is not crap called Raspbian. Its cleaned Ubuntu or pure Debian, generic. It has fast download servers for their touch to the system (kernel and special tools you might need to use board advanced/special features), while generic packages comes from their fast servers.

Yes, you can report upstream, but your Ubuntu upstream has usually no clue what you are talking about - in a special hw related features. Reporting bug in VI, JOE and other applications … we all already use upstream / generic support where exists. Armbian does not support user space /GNU/ applications that are the same in all Unix world. Is that something special for Ubuntu? No.

They do provide everything, except for your Pi. Which Armbian doesn’t care of at all. Sane people would not waste their time for the product that is closed.

And what makes your comment pure gold? :wink:

#24

I compared the packages between Ubuntu’s and Armbian’s repos, didn’t really see much difference. Not to mention, these “special features” and discrepancies from upstream usually just make it more difficult to diagnose issues. Just recently I had to fight with Armbian on nPi Neo2, it was very annoying to install netplan and nftables because the configuration tool’s package has dependencies defined wrong. Do tell me again how it’s “just like Ubuntu”.

More often than not, it’s not “special HW-related features”, at least in my experience. Not to mention, they usually tell what’s the proper place to report if it concerns some more specific subcomponent they don’t know much about.

Exactly, and you can’t only rely on “unsane” people to provide software support, because it’s not reliable enough.

I do not claim it as pure gold, just as what I think of as the truth.

#25

I estimate we yearly lost around 50-100.000 EUR on support due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

Its perception matter, like the truth. Every day people, users, need closest best approximation to be able to understand what to expect. We never said its 100% compatible. Ubuntu is not 100% compatible to Ubuntu because its not near to such quality. I believe you never see anything else that you are comparing it to?

Closer definition to the imaginary truth is:" use space packages has the same relations as Ubuntu" and that’s all. Ubuntu crap has been removed, a few bugs has been fixed and we don’t use OS most important part - kernel / loader / “bios”. Ubuntu and mainstream kernel is not and will never be good enough for our standards.

Why don’t you just go to www.ubuntu.com, download your stuff and stop wasting my time. Again. Just use product with more reliable support.

You want better support? I am glad to sell it to you, but for free if you know more then me, Google is your friend.

#26

I wish I could. I have to use Armbian, because that’s currently the best available, but as I’ve explained, it’s not as good as it could be. I totally understand the irrational feeling to start and defend a project - “but instead look at x and y and how nice they are”, but in the end one has to face the reality and see where things are lacking so that those things can actually be improved. Telling people to piss off, stop wasting your time or any similar condescension is not really the correct way.

This is just pure hubris, I would love to see an explanation how a few people can outcompete both upstream and Ubuntu’s teams in terms of “standards”. Not to mention, if what you have is better than upstream, why isn’t it in upstream? Because of their standards :thinking:?

#27

Improve it or drop cash and we will hire people to improve it. Until all you do is making a damage to the non profit project, you don’t deserve professional correspondence.

Climb up and see on your own.

#28

An SBC doesn’t need to support specific linux distributions. It just needs to support mainline linux and come with a bootloader that is easy to understand and manipulate. Supporting specific linux distributions is not a good long-term business strategy.

Figuring out how to manually install and configure u-boot on Rock Pi 4 is certainly not easy although it is documented on rockchip wiki. Odroid N2 comes with petitboot which is easy to handle. Raspberry Pi comes with a built-in bootloader that’s easier to handle than u-boot.

Rock Pi 4 now has support for mainline linux. Once you know a working configuration of linux kernel for a specific SBC, the rest is straightforward.

Once you take care of mainline linux and bootloader, you can install any linux distribution easily just as you would on x86 computers. No x86 computer boasts support for specific linux distributions because mainline kernel and bootloader are easy to manipulate on x86 computers.

2 Likes
#29

Armbian is 1st a build system like Yocto or Buildroot. Just simpler. A distribution is a side product, a demonstration. Its mainly fun but dealing with peoples insane wishes.

Its not Armbian’s fault why Ubuntu does not care about those little cheap devices even mainline support is relatively good. We invest a lot to keep this up on this level. But if someone feels a need for a better support - project is open - he can invest. Everything is upstreamed at some point so its investment into all Linux distributions.

You can also wait and wait and wait … (hardware will become obsolete in the mean time) before all distributions pick it up. Do we need them all? Of course not. Will they be able to maintain our support level? I don’t think so. Remember that we only care of a selection of hardware while ignoring the rest, while average Linux distribution “supports” everything.

Perhaps. There is just a small problem - most boards in the wilderness does not have SPI and all boots differently - ARM computers are here to be good at one single task - except few general purpose ones. There is no unique loader. In most bizarre cases (Rpi) you have to chain load many different loaders before you finally get to the point to load a generic Linux …

ARM is a world of diversity. x86 is like Rpi. And Rpi is totally different than other ARM devices, there is little compatibility between generations … and unique ARM64 kernel is only today in experimental phase. And its not good enough - at least not for us. We still use kernel per family (rockchip, allwinner, amlogic, …) to provide best possible support and we are prepared to upgrade to common arm64 kernel when this will be good for you. Ubuntu is easily ignore entire family or two. because they officially supports only Rpi.

At the end of the day its all about support, support, support. Real, not theoretical.

#30

We don’t deal (much) with user space which is why I told @avamander that he has to fix his netplan ubuntu problems on his own or hire someone to fix it for him (we don’t need it but he is welcome to upstream the fix). Most of our work is kernel/loaders related (this is that common things that all distros need) and its in your best interest to help us not wasting time with rubbish or supporting (being slave to) spoiled kids.

#31

:roll_eyes:

Nonono, it’s not a my problem, it’s a problem I’ve encountered because of your changes.

Why are you getting touchy and condescending if you, yourself, have said that it’s a problem and I just mention it?

#32

It is your problem. Check your support licence.

#33

I don’t have the time to spend figuring out where you’ve hardcoded the dependencies on iptables, NetworkManager and ifupdown, where you keep all the sources, how’s your build process like and etc. etc. People familiar with the project would probably do it with one fifth the time and I could spend it on working on another FOSS project(s).

#34

I have not demanded a fix, feel free to not fix it, there’s probably hundreds of projects that haven’t implemented a fix or a feature I’ve requested and that’s fine. But blaming me, and being condescending is not okay or something that I tolerate.

#35

It’s likewise … and I do apologise for being an ass.

1 Like
#36

You should seriously consider coming over to gentoo linux where you can enable and disable dependencies.

#37

Come over to gentoo linux.

#38

I like Armbian, and i use it on all my devices. Ubuntu is so slow, on all the devides i have installed it on. So slow i was bored every time…

Thanks. People do it free help other people with their problems for free.

#39

Oh I actually did use it for a while for that exact reason. Absolutely loved how fast everything was compiled exactly for my RPi. But unfortunately distcc doesn’t work cross-distro cross-arch in any reasonable way and building was really way too slow in the end, I couldn’t finish one update before I had to start another one. Another issue was that Gentoo’s systemd support is really poor, most services ran in legacy compatibility mode, but I like my services nicely managed and easy to have an overview of. Maybe one day I’ll try again on more powerful hardware.

#40

Rock Pi 4 4GB + NVMe SSD should be fast enough without distcc. You can use zswap on it to minimize swap usage. Don’t use zram because zram is not compatible with swap.

Compile most packages except large packages on tmpfs.
You can specify a different portage build directory for large packages via /etc/portage/package.env