I got excited for a minute, and then I looked into the m4v2, and their software support just feels... hacky? Like, they support several flavors of Ubuntu, and a... (at the time they released it last fall) 2 year old version of Android?
I guess the question here is one I have with every non-RPi board: if the company behind NanoPi disappears tomorrow, can I continue to run a current version of a distro, forever, using a vanilla Linux kernel? If not... I'll pass, thanks.
While the RPi Foundation has their own fork of Debian and the Linux kernel, you can run stock Debian with a stock kernel on it just fine, and some of the missing drivers are being upstreamed all the time. The community has built images based on various other distros as well.
I recently went through the difficult process of taking an old (commercial) NAS that was running Debian squeeze and an ancient 2.6.31 kernel, and upgrading it to Debian buster and a 5.6 kernel. I was incredibly lucky that a hobbyist had upstreamed support for its hardware a bunch of years ago. If it hadn't been for that, I would have been stuck. I expect that sort of thing from a commercial appliance, but for a board I'm buying for its hackability, I expect to not be tied to the company that makes it for software updates.
I guess the question here is one I have with every non-RPi board: if the company behind NanoPi disappears tomorrow, can I continue to run a current version of a distro, forever, using a vanilla Linux kernel? If not... I'll pass, thanks.
While the RPi Foundation has their own fork of Debian and the Linux kernel, you can run stock Debian with a stock kernel on it just fine, and some of the missing drivers are being upstreamed all the time. The community has built images based on various other distros as well.
I recently went through the difficult process of taking an old (commercial) NAS that was running Debian squeeze and an ancient 2.6.31 kernel, and upgrading it to Debian buster and a 5.6 kernel. I was incredibly lucky that a hobbyist had upstreamed support for its hardware a bunch of years ago. If it hadn't been for that, I would have been stuck. I expect that sort of thing from a commercial appliance, but for a board I'm buying for its hackability, I expect to not be tied to the company that makes it for software updates.