What does Armbian 22.05 add in terms of support for Radxa Zero?

The new release of Armbian now officially supports Radxa Zero, which seems to be a direct contradiction of discussions in this forum in March about how Armbian was dropping support for Raxda Zero.

What’s the difference between the Radxa version of Armbian and the official one, and what does version 22.05 of Armbian bring to the table?

Not sure guess there is both in case Armbian decide to pull support again, so maybe similar but an alternative now has to be maintained.

Moves like this are like battleships, it’s very difficult to make the boat turn in another direction once you’ve started a turn. I don’t anticipate they’ll be pulling their official support - I would guess that their issues with getting support from the community at large have been adequately addressed.

That said, I’m interested in exactly what they’ve done. ‘armbian-config’ is appealing. The Radxa version of Debian hasn’t got any sort of Radxa specific configuration tools that I can find.

I am the opposite and really hate all those scripts as they add a whole load of Armbian specifics often already pre-installed where you have to know Armbian.
I don’t use Armbian to what I consider some very hacky scripts that merely config existing linux packages.
Debian base or Ubuntu base where if I need to install standard linux utils then I can as then I know what is installed and how its configured.

So for me irrespective of if Armbian do provide support or not, I really don’t need any of them as often with SBC I am creating for specific applications from magic-mirror to NAS and I want a clean base so I know where I am at.
So we all have different preferences but after withdrawing support, I don’t have any confidence and would not touch Armbian again for that alone.
I really like that Radxa now do there own base images and wish they also would just stick to minimal server versions as often the community provide a great array of desktops built on those bases.
Also I have become a big fan of Manjaro as they seem to concentrate on just what is necessary with some great desktop implementations without the script bloat as its pretty much standard Manjaro/Arch linux where you can add utils if needed.

Not directly related with Radxa. We re-set support rules which were too luxurious and everyone were just taking,demanding more and more, wasting our time and contributing absolutely noting in return. This ratio went to the extreme.

We asked community to take at least some small burden away https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Board-Support-Rules/ and almost every week someone steps up to be a maintainer. But we also set requirements low enough, otherwise nobody would showed up. Its all about responsibility. “You” want that things work - contribute at least something if they dare to ask for support. Support. This term have lots of different meanings and values. Can be dirt cheap (rolling distros), can be expensive like hell (Linux creator, framework maintainer and a distro = Armbian). Abused just like “freedom” “democracy” …

You must have mixed Armbian with something else (Dietpi?) but I agree and admit that armbian-config was not written by best coding standards. Which is the reason its still labelled as “beta”. As I am long time in this business I know refactoring of this into a professionally written software would be very expensive. It would require several full time people working on this for several months, a year or more. I understand the complexity but even my - most people would say very pessimistic - estimations proved to be wrong.

After two years of designing, planning, seeking for funding, numerous of meetings, we finally started with coding this configurator from scratch. ETA 1/2023 Job is huge and anyone is welcome to join killing the tasks, reviewing the code.

Its nice to see how far mainline Linux kernel came, but using raw mainline Linux in production? I assume you don’t setup NAS to see how fast it goes following by its dissasembly?

Yes, that would be a nice for DE hoppers and Linux distro hoppers in general. Can’t say SBC market is distro hoppers friendly because of its specifics and higher support costs per hardware family.

Manjarno news ticker is still there?

Armbian is perfectly clean. Perhaps you are mixing things up again? Armbian with that bloated version of Armbian OS with theme changer and games that some kids were providing?

No @igorp I did not mix anything I don’t like your hackfest of scripts like you admit ‘was not written by best coding standards.’ and is still beta and for most parts unnecessary as really you could just document how to set up each as you are purely doing config scripts which is much better to actually just do some documentation about them.
You could even add them to a repo as individual packages so a user has choice of what is installed, but no its this huge integral script that just obfuscates what are normal installs and config.

You can not create professional software or at least you do not as some scripts to set config is hardly professional software. As far as I am aware Arabian doesn’t provide a single piece of software that is not script and probably all is merely to set config that you could document how to instead.

Its nice to see how far mainline Linux kernel came, but using raw mainline Linux in production? I assume you don’t setup NAS to see how fast it goes following by its dissasembly?

Exactly what that means as the ubuntu 22.04 I am writing this on at this moment is raw mainline and its the same old story with you that for some reason you believe you provide anything that is not elsewhere available and that in some way you are a professional provider which many would argue you are not.

Again totally bemused at what you mean with your once more imaginary support costs that no-one is paying you.
The SBC is exactly the same as any other when it comes to desktops as the hardware is already done and supported in the base (or should be) and is purely software config of the various gotcha’s of knitting those desktops into a preferred config.
By DE hoppers and Linux distro hoppers do you mean actual users as yes for users a range of desktops is always welcome as many have different preferences.

No again I am not mixing things up and no Armbian is not be perfectly clean as if it was Armbian config would not exist and it would seem to be you confusing what is clean and what is not.

My answers were to OP since yours were too biased. Questions were rhetorical - isn’t that obvious?

I have no intention to convince you into anything.

Well maybe you shouldn’t of quoted me in each paragraph and thank you as frankly I am sick of your BS.

The Armbian build hosted in radxa-build GitHub organization is built with unmodified armbian/build project. We started to provide those when Armbian stopped providing prebuilt images for many of our devices. They are provided as a free service so users don’t have to spend time building from scratch.