this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2026
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Also, limited support, both in community size and time. Those Chinese manufacturing companies come and go like docker containers. They spin one up to sell some product for a while, then when they're done they dissolve it. If you want any support, you're on your own.
It's hard to imagine exactly what kind of person would want to build their own Linux media server but also actually needs to contact tech support for hardware they own outright.
Half the fun anyway is getting it to work at all, the other half is tweaking and getting it to work exactly the way you want.
I'm a $50-$100 "mystery Thinkpad from eBay" kind of guy. From what I gather, there are lots of us. Exactly zero times have I thought "oh but what if I need to contact Lenovo?" LMAO
I mean community support, as in the number of people using them and have experience, who know what works and what doesn't.
Tech support in the sense of stuff like bios updates is important too.
Yeah, good point. The ability to download necessary firmware updates/patches from a safe, trusted source is easy to take for granted, but that shouldn't be overlooked.
The makers of both Orange Pi and Banana Pi have been around for years, over a decade at least for Orange Pi.
In fact in my experience SBC makers tend to be quite stable, possibly because those thinks are a lot more technically complex than, say, an electric kettle.