Most of those SBCs have very poor software support. You will often need to go on GitHub or the manufactuer's support website to hunt down an OS image that hopefully works. If you want to stay up to date, tough luck. You will be lucky if your board is still receiving updates two years after release.
In the meanwhile in raspberry pi land, you can just go to download a reasonably new OS image from their website anytime you want and it will run on all their models. Even the Pi 1 model B+ which is over ten years old still receives updates, and will continue to do so until at least 2030.
Unless reviewing and playing with random boards is your hobby or job, in which case more power to you and thank you for providing valuable information to the community, you are likely better off buying a boring raspi so you can just get things done.
Interestingly, it’s the opposite for me, and I almost exclusively see comments about software support & linux mainlaine.
That said, I think 90% of the time it’s better to buy small x86 machine than a PI. Those have great software support, are more powerful, and can be cheaper (slightly larger & no GPIO, those two are the main reasons to go SBC)
Raspberry Pi usually requires customisation from the distro. This is mitigated by the fact that many distros have done that customisation but the platform itself is not well-designed for SW support.
Meanwhile many Allwinner and Rockchip platforms have great mainline support. While Qualcomm is apparently moving in the right direction but historically there have been lots of Qualcomm SBCs where the software support is just a BSP tarball on a fixed Linux kernel.
So yeah I do agree with your conclusion but it's not as simple as "RPi has the best software support and don't buy Chinese". You have to look into it on a case by case basis.
Are you saying that even with the Raspberry Pi we are still at the mercy of the hardware manufacturer when it comes to OS images?
Raspberry Pi supports their images long term however, so you won't have to do that anytime soon.
Another benefit of raspberry pi is its popularity, there are just more projects out there compared to less known SBC manufacturers. Iirc the Archlinux arm project have images for the raspberry pi 4 (maybe 5).
And then the construction quality/tolerance too. I've had Pis last for years and then cheap alternatives burn out after a few months of moderate use.
If you're lucky! Most of the time it's a questionable Google Drive link.
I wonder if AI can help bridge the gap and provide the missing support that these vendors don't wish to provide.
Armbian do a great job of handling support for a whole host of boards (including most I included in this list), so you'll usually have Debian/Ubuntu-based flavours. Vendor kernels and vendor supplied images will be hit and miss. Mainline Linux support is a flag you filter by on the benchmark comparison site linked in the article, but it's a difficult one to keep up to date and define exactly. It could have some kind of support, but miss out on display functionality, or WiFi yada yada. What would we then class as having mainline support? All hardware etc functioning? If so, very, very few will meet that definition.
I get the desire for the information, and perhaps I should have envisioned these types of questions, but all I initially meant for the post to be was a recap for people following me to see which boards I'd tested that were released last year :D
If your standard is "supports suspend/resume", there's even plenty of laptops that won't meet it.
That gave me a laugh.
(From what I've learned so far, some magic incantation is required to convince Linux that a Lifebook E559 is a laptop not a tablet. I'm finding I have way less patience with these side-quests as I get older.)
Disclaimer: I have never used any RISC-V board.
I can image having a very usable ARM linux laptop and tablet as a result of this — maybe even cellphone when the modems get mainlined or used via USB.
If you need software to be available in 2, 3, 5 years, get a raspberry pi.
Some might have some software available, some might have patches, some may need manual compiling, some only support debian with 2.4 kernel, some have binary blobs that only work on that 2.4 kernel, some have working usb ports on 2.4 and no gpio, but working gpio with 2.6 kernel but no usb ports, etc.
Just get a raspberry pi.
btw, i have inherited projects that used raspberry pis for the computing. every single one had to be reworked replacing the pi.
additionally, if the pi doesnt fit your RF footprint needs in an enclosure, it is not possible to get the chips standalone. plus the schematic is not open source. fuck broadcom and fuck raspberry pi foundation. acceptable for light hobby use only