I feel like there are a lot of these types of articles that verge on blogspam. Literally 60% of the content is just specs from the manufacturer regurgitated in one spot. It would be nice if the author had done some actual comparison or tried some benchmark on each. Even if they just booted up each one and saw how easy it was to write a blog post on each it might be enlightening beyond the specs which anyone could gather.

Yup pretty weak article.

In their defence seeedstudio has done good stuff for the sbc ecosystem so inclined to give them a free pass

It's a pity the most important info is often omitted:

- Can it run mainline Linux kernel? What about a major Linux distribution?

- How good is the documentation?

- Which major peripherals (audio input, audio output, camera, HDMI, USB on headers) are available?

- Are there GPIOs with usable levels (not 1.8V!) and with large pitch (2.54/1.27)?

- Are there embedded low-level peripherals, like I2C, multiple serial ports, PWM generators, ADC, DACs?

Its a little disappointing that after all of the years and revisions of the rpi. It still requires untrusted proprietary drivers to simply turn on.

To be fair, Linus, you and everyone who develops the board bitch about that same thing. Some people even parrot it without understanding the underlying issues at even a basic level. So let's see their models that compete with the rpi at the same price point. Until I see those, I am left to see a whole lot petty whining. The rpi is very much in front of the pack when it comes to their clearly stated mandate.

Remember the purpose, and not lean too heavily onto your personal ideology.

I haven't used it personally but I was told that the RockPi (https://rockpi.org/) is similar to the rpi but runs on totally free drivers. Having a backdoor with full system access is just not acceptable in 2019.

What are you referring to?

ZFS eats memory for breakfast. All thats stopping a Pi being a really great BSD+ZFS filestore is the USB bound disk access and the lack of memory. The sweetspot would be north of 4GB, but probably 8GB would be enough. SATA would totally rock because you can get SATA enclosures which handle all the hot swap you need, and the bandwidth is fine.

So.. you can get a SATA Pi-Hat. But.. you can't boost memory north of 4GB. (sigh)

Also a added gigabit Nic would mean a nice firewall.

Rasp 4 already has gigabit and does work as a firewall

Been using that for past couple months

My understanding is that he meant having a total of two ports, so that you can use one for WAN and one for LAN.

Just add a USB3 ethernet adapter. Works fine

How about for real-time audio?

What are you doing that can't be done with an A72 and a heat sink?