Intel Kills Its NUC Line (pcworld.com) 67
Intel has decided to stop making its Next Unit of Computing (NUC), but the company will encourage partners to keep making the small form-factor (SFF) PCs, the company said Tuesday. From a report: Intel's NUC championed compact PCs, while leaving larger chassis options to partners like Dell and HP. But Intel's decision seems like a natural one, given that Intel has refocused on its core businesses during a period in which it also invested heavily in its own manufacturing operations and foundry business.
An Intel spokesman confirmed an initial report by Serve The Home, saying that Intel will continue to support the existing NUCs it has already shipped into the market. "We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth," the Intel spokesman said in an email.
An Intel spokesman confirmed an initial report by Serve The Home, saying that Intel will continue to support the existing NUCs it has already shipped into the market. "We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth," the Intel spokesman said in an email.
They Were Too Expensive Anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong they were pretty cool and everything but the price was too high for what you got. A laptop was a better deal and came with a screen.
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Yep. My home server is a Nuc, it performs like a champ.
I'll be sad to see them go.
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Wish mind had - it only ran Kodi, but was prone to racing fans and freezes.
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Absolutely, they were pretty expensive. Fortunately, others companies started to offer miniPCs and some pretty powerful.
That's missing the point. I use a Nuc because it fits in a small space and only uses about 20W.
It's on 24/7 and I remember seeing the difference in the electricity bill after I installed the Nuc and tossed out the old PC.
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I don't think he's missing the point. He said other companies are now making mini PCs. They are the same form factor and have the same power consumption as the Intel NUC, but are much less expensive. I have one myself and love it.
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I just checked Aliexpress and there's a flood of them that weren't there before. I'll check them out. I'm sure they're fine if they have a decent power supply.
Thanks for the heads-up!
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There are a lot of Chinese no-name mini PCs available, which are surprisingly decent. Most have moved to soldering the RAM onto the motherboard, so make sure to get the RAM you are needing from the outset. If something breaks, don't expect much support though, but since they are essentially laptop components without the battery, they are fairly reliable.
For an everyday desktop, they are not too bad. They are definitely not gaming rigs, but they do provide a good bang for your buck. I've found them usefu
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For example, LattePanda. They aren't the cheapest SBCs but they are good performers.
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It wasn't that long ago when a 4x4 board with an Atom-tier CPU on it was easily in the thousands of dollars, because the places selling them assumed that you were buying one for a military application, so charged milspec prices. Now, one can get something that can function as a desktop... and still have GPIO pins to work as an edge computing device.
With the logjam of Raspberry Pi availability finally over, not to mention the competition ahead in that game, I can see why Intel decided to fold and move on.
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Re:They Were Too Expensive Anyway (Score:5, Informative)
A Pi.
Practically all the alternatives offer better HW, but bring with that a hellscape of unmaintained out-of-tree patches to actually get working X, LAN/WiFi, etc etc. Unless you're just collecting SBCs for fun, the Pi is still the only meaningful horse in this race, despite its significantly lower specs and its own multitude of software problems (mostly around acceleration for video encode and decode, and anything else to do with the godawful Broadcom VideoCore).
I love tinkering with these things, but until the SoC providers actually start putting a non-zero amount of effort into supporting their chips you need to have teenager levels of free time just to get them "sort of, mostly" up and running. On a Pi4 though, I can set up basically anything I want - whether that's a headless server running as NAS / router / DNS / etc, or a full desktop, or both - *running my distro of choice* in about ten minutes, and know that (nearly) everything will Just Work.
If spending the weekend compiling (cross- or otherwise) random tgz's from .cn domains just to get working Ethernet is still a luxury you can afford, and doing so still interests you, then yeah: pick pretty much any of the dozens of "better Pi's" out there, and you will indeed get something with 2-8x the CPU power; and/or a Mali GPU that, technically, on paper, is massively more capable and performant than POSVC6; and so on. The "problem" is that if you want an SBC for HW projects, the Pi's GPIO, software support, and massively-larger ecosystem make it easily the best option. If you want an SBC for SW projects, the support and ecosystem again make it the only reasonable choice.
If you want something "significantly more powerful" than the Pi4, you're into active cooling territory and would probably be better off with an N95 NUC or similar, or even an x86 ITX build, because the intersection of genuine needs for "more than 4x 2GHz of CPU" *and* GPIO is microscopic - which is why the dozens of companies making such devices are invariably years behind with their OS support. :(
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The "problem" is that if you want an SBC for HW projects, the Pi's GPIO, software support, and massively-larger ecosystem make it easily the best option.
That's assuming that you can even get one. If it weren't for that, I would 100% agree with you.
The community made the device relevant, especially by providing the body of software and doing the bulk of support, then the Pi foundation prioritized corporate sales and blew us off.
If you want something "significantly more powerful" than the Pi4, you're into active cooling territory and would probably be better off with an N95 NUC or similar, or even an x86 ITX build, because the intersection of genuine needs for "more than 4x 2GHz of CPU" *and* GPIO is microscopic - which is why the dozens of companies making such devices are invariably years behind with their OS support. :(
Absolutely true. Most would be better off hanging an Arduino off of their PC and using that for GPIO. Mini ITX has always been cheaper than a NUC, and also standards-based and serviceable, so it's always been a better option unless yo
Re:They Were Too Expensive Anyway (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: They Were Too Expensive Anyway (Score:3)
Screens may be superfluous but no problem either.
Being designed for and including batteries on the other hand makes laptops pretty compelling.
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I've had pretty crap luck with UPS personally. Even at their best in the consumer space, UPS management tends to be pretty crap.
And they are *way* bigger than any space gained by forgoing the screen. Being entirely on the DC side of things and bothering to use LiOn instead of VRLA makes for much smaller battery accomodations.
In terms of compromises, from what I've experienced, going up to Mini-ITX gets you into mainstream to be sure, but most of the "Mini-PCs" I've seen are just laptop grade components w
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Exactly, I have two of these running my home lab.
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The thing is, there are many SBCs with Intel CPUs and such nowadays as well. And we're not talking hacked together ones from spare parts like you can find from China, we're talking official SBCs using properly sourced parts.
They're becoming really expensive Raspberry Pis - you get a board, you stick in RAM and an m.2 SSD, and install the OS.
I think between Phil's Computer Lab and ExplainingComputers there's a lot of reviews for these devices.
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They have a lot of penetration in the homelab market. Those people don't want screens, they want low power draw devices with good processors and Intel iGPUs. While you can technically get that with a laptop, too, they have more points of failure
the only additional points of failure are in the display itself, the laptop will probably still function if that stuff goes bad.
and are not generally supported as well as direct from Intel devices with firmware updates
Why would I need a bunch of firmware updates for something doing the same job as a NUC?
Re:They Were Too Expensive Anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone else noted, these are beloved in the home lab market. They are small and low power, which means you can put several of them into a small space in a rack or cabinet and not have problems with heat or power consumption. Great for running Docker or Proxmox or whatnot. Put one on the network as a low power Plex server, one has a pfsense router, and another running bunch of Docker apps and you have a highly capable home lab in a very small space.
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I run all you mentioned as VMs running on 2 NUCs that form a Proxmox cluster. That means I can upgrade my cluster and when I need the firepower I can move everything off my lowest spec one and go full blast on the other. They're pretty darn powerful!
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Exactly. When I was the guy who evaluated desktop / laptop / thin client hardware for purchase at a Fortune 50, Intel always wanted us to take a look at these things. But they were just too expensive for what was inside in comparison to similar form factors from large OEMs that would work with us on price and added-value propositions. So we always ended up with Dell or HP thin clients, or something like the Lenovo m-Series "Tiny" which packed in enterprise manageability into a small form factor as well a
Re:They Were Too Expensive Anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Don't get me wrong they were pretty cool and everything but the price was too high for what you got. A laptop was a better deal and came with a screen.
No they weren't. They were actually incredibly cost effective against the competition. These were never designed to be a laptop or to share a market with a laptop. If a laptop suits you then you shouldn't have been looking at a NUC in the first place.
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Don't get me wrong they were pretty cool and everything but the price was too high for what you got. A laptop was a better deal and came with a screen.
No they weren't.
No what wasn't what? A laptop wasn't a better deal? Yes, it was. You got more machine for less money, frequently with more compatibility. Intel never even officially tested or supported anything but Windows on their NUC line.
These were never designed to be a laptop or to share a market with a laptop.
They're made out of the same parts as a low end laptop, except they don't have the display. But they cost at least as much as a laptop made out of the same parts, with a display, and often more. So whether they were meant to share that market or not, that's what wound up happening.
If yo
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They had excellent driver support, though. If you wanted a cheap and easy homelab "server" for something like ESXi, they were great because of the easy setup. If you tried that same stunt with one of the knockoff products from Acer or ASUS, you were likely going to run into issues.
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Agreed. I was pricing one out and discovered that a used Mac Mini was cheaper.
So they Nuked the Nuc (Score:1)
nuf sed
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Came here to say this, but you beat me to it.
Cheaper Alternatives Were Better for Expansion (Score:4, Interesting)
The cheaper alternatives on the market for mini-PCs and that small form factor were always better than the Intel NUC line, sometimes by 1/2 the price or way more. The NUCs were well designed and engineered but who wants to pay USD $400 to $800+ for a tiny PC that you wanted for some minor purpose like a media server, home theater, retro gaming, Linux server, etc. purposes where you wanted to do it on a cheap USD $100-200 budget max.
I think the Intel NUCs were over-priced and over-powered for what they offered and they had no expansion abilities to add anything to them that wasn't built it. They were fine for back-of-the-monitor mini-PCs but they were too-expensive for that also at those prices. My guess it that they were for the corporate market so that these mini-PCs could be replaced and tossed out easily without dealing with big bulky cases and could be mounted on the back of the monitor using standard VESA mount dimensions [intel.com].
mini-ITX Embedded
Personally, I looked into the NUCs a few times before and was always stopped by the high prices and lack of expansion. Instead, I built a media center and home theater and Linux server mini-PC a decade and a half ago using the mini-ITX form factor for $120 + storage SSD $100 + HDD $150 + memory $20 and had a nice Asus AT5IONT-I motherboard [asus.com] with Intel Atom D525 dual-core 1.8GHz CPU [intel.com] with nVidia GT218 graphics that could hardware decode 1080p running on Linux (Ubuntu originally 9.04 upgraded over the years to 18.04 last 32-bit release with nVidia 340.108 last driver for the GT218 video card).
In the last few years I built another mini-ITX box that has the ASRock J5040 [asrock.com] motherboard with an Intel Pentium Silver J5040 dual-core 2.0-3.2 GHz on-board CPU (Intel ARK) [intel.com] for just about the same amount of money that can do 4K decoding in hardware and pass-through HDMI audio for a nice retro gaming PCs and media center with a Linux server for home services. The new one has for 2 x HDD for (data on ZFS mirror) and 1 x SSD (OS) with 1 x SATA left over and 8GB RAM on Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS). (I wish AMD had some embedded CPU options since those would be cheaper but I couldn't find any mini-ITX motherboards with AMDs on-board.)
Both of them run cool with nice 120mm slow dual 900 RPM fans on the sides of the small case. Both of them run in these small mini-ITX cases from Apex MI-008 250W PS ITX Cases (Amazon) [amazon.com] that used to cost USD $50 and you can still find them for USD $80 around somewhere. There were also equivalent cases made by Rosewill Mini ITX 250W RS-MI-01 (Amazon) [amazon.com] that can be found around for a nice mini-ITX built.
Too bad that the mini-ITX with embedded CPUs are no longer popular and you have to buy a more expensive motherboard and the CPU separately which ends up cost twice as much as the embedded combo. These days even an embedded CPU has enough power to drive 4K video + audio out of HDMI for home theater or retro gaming using RetroArch or ScummVM so there's no need for any separate CPU with cooler combo that is hotter and louder than embedded with passive cooling or tiny fan with large case fans.
There are bigger and nicer mini-ITX cases available but they are pricier. SilverStone and Thermaltake make some nice ones but they are bigger and most expensive.
Quiet HDDs Gone
(On a side note, I am upset that Western Digital stopped their Green line of HDDs that run slow, quiet, and cool at 5400 RPMs sinc
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Power Draw
Forgot to mention that the older mini-ITX PC uses somewhere around ~15 Watts and the newer one ~18 Watts from the wall and they run cool and quiet. When I do a CPU stress test I can see the power draw increase to the mid 20 Watt range but then drop off quickly once I stopped stressing the CPUs. The 1 x and 2 x HDDs with 1 x SSD each hardly use any power at all also when doing reads or writes.
They are very power efficient and those 250 Watt power supplies in those cases are hardly stressed or use
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I think the HDD noise thing is due to using Shingled Magnetic Recording, so the HDD is pretending to be a traditional HDD. This means it has huge zones (256MB) that need to be erased at once, and also there's a separate Standard HDD zone which can be freely rewritten at 4K write sizes. But your filesystem will keep some things in the small-write-zone, and other things in the big-write-zone, making for lots of seeking.
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The WD Blue 5640RPM 8TB HDDs that I use are listed as CMR (Constant Magnetic Recording) and not SMR, and I checked but they still do some kind of optimization and re-write, same with the WD Red Pro NAS when they go idle after some large writes. Might be file system related on Windows with NTFS or Linux with ZFS or just the drive firmware doing some kind of re-calibration. Not sure. I don't quite remember if they do that even after I unmount or eject them, but I think that still happens on the Red Pro NAS
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Once you start running multiple functions on them the extra $1-200 you might pay becomes trivial. I have two Proxmox servers running 4VMs each in a cluster and for me something I trust is well worth the premium.
NUCs weren't very reliable (Score:2, Interesting)
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I have a few running in my stupidly dusty (window always open) home office, three years going strong. They are all 10's.
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I was a big fan of the NUCs for tight spaces and a clean office look. They looked great and could be mounted under the desk or tucked away, but cooling was always an issue. The fans got gunked up and the vents clogged. We've gone with a slightly large machine (the Dell Optiplex micros) and haven't had the cooling issues. The cost was about the same, maybe cheaper once you threw in a Windows license.
But I'll miss them.
Well that sucks (Score:1)
These things made great SCADA head-ends. No driver guessing and they fit anywhere.
They had an annoying design flaw (Score:3)
NUCs didn't run on 12V or 24V they ran on 19V which is commonly known in the industry and that voltage nothing else runs on. I had so many chances to give a NUC a try, but in every case I ended up paying more for a competitor's product just to avoid a pointless powersupply. In many situations one of these mini-PCs would be useful you're running 12V or 24V equipment. Fit-PC seems to still be going strong. https://fit-iot.com/web/ [fit-iot.com]
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Bad move (Score:2)
I have three, andI specifically bought them because I didn't have to fight all kinds of stupid naming conventions and inconsistent Linux support their "partners" have. Sure, you can get something cheaper, but for a home server or cluster they are fantastic.
When I looked at Dell it became instantly clear they were targeting a very different market with theirs.
When I go for my next one I will seriously consider an ARM chip.
Re:Bad move (Score:4, Informative)
Good luck with that. ARM as a replacement for a NUC has several problems. While the power consumption and overall performance will be okay, ARM in this space is really hobbled by a lack of platform standardization. You can't just grab a random ARM SBC board and run a standard, generic OS on it. Hardware trees and boot methods and storage options vary wildly. There's no such thing as UEFI, at least on the SBCs, so every system requires it's own customized boot loader that may or may not boot USB, SD Cards, SATA, etc. Kernels are all specific forks for the SBC, and the chinese vendors making these things rapidly lose interest in supporting them with new kernels and drivers. OpenGL graphics support varies widely, often relying on dodgy third-party forks of Mesa that may or may not be developed in the future. In most cases you'll run a vendor-specific fork of Armbian. It's not like you can just grab the latest Fedora or Debian ARM edition and expect to install and boot it on the SBC.
I recently picked up an Orange Pi 5 as a potential desktop driver. While the hardware is pretty decent, it's stuck with kernel 5.10, and installing the Mesa drivers causes all kinds of package conflicts when updating Ubuntu. I had hoped I could use it as a workstation in my lab, but alas, no I'll be buying a mini AMD or Intel box instead.
Until we get some kind of standardized ARM PC platform that everyone follows, I don't see ARM making any inroads as far as PCS, servers, or laptops goes, outside of Apple. So if you need a small computer, don't be fooled by the low price. It's just not worth it, even if the x86 machine is 3 or 4 times the cost of the ARM SBC.
Also we really do need some sort of Rosetta-like system for Linux on Arm. Sometimes it's necessary to run a proprietary x86 binary. Box86 and Box64 are the closest to providing this, but in my testing are a long ways from working for most of the binaries I threw at it.
Finally for those hoping RISC V will be somehow good for Linux and the community, sadly RISC V is no different than ARM in all these areas I mentioned, which is pretty disheartening.
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Haven't posted in years, but just had to jump in here. Never buy a board that only has the vendor distro. Instead, only buy boards that are supported by Armbian. Most of those boards will have upstream support in Debian or similar in a few years. Yes, the RK3588 boards are all limited to kernel 5.10 [and this is actually a lie, it's a forward ported 4.19], but the RK3568 [admittedly, a much reduced CPU] does have kernel 6.1. and RK3588 will likely have an upstream kernel in 1-2 years.
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Yes your advice is good if you want an embedded board that will being doing Pi-like things. But for general desktop/laptop computing, it's not so simple. And even boards supported by Armbian are subject to limitations and board manufacturer support (binary blobs, lack of drivers, power management, boot issues). It's just not a great situation at all, and nothing like the PC world. ARM as a company doesn't care about fragmentation of their licensees, nor do the care about a general-purpose platform (neit
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It is partially a question of your expectations.
a) most of my expectations are as a mini-server. Specific purposes. But not particularly Pi-like if you assume GPIO is the primary interest of Pi devices.
b) I have an RK3588 [Rock5] I'm using as a replacement for a 10 year old VIA NanoX4, as a bastion/jump host plus holder of many a screen session [including Slashdot on elinks]. Because I don't care about graphic acceleration, it works fine, and for some [single-threaded] purposes this board is actually FASTER
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No question it can work for some. But what about long-term maintenance? My OPi5 would make a good server in many respects and in fact I'm going to use it as a little server for some minor use. But ultimately I don't want to run some random kernel fork and custom drivers on a mini server. Not to mention the custom u-boot stuff. How would I do a major OS upgrade (assuming support for the board isn't abandoned by then) with funky boot methods, etc?
Whether you want a mini server or something bigger, I think
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Part of the answer to that is to watch the debian supported board list.
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/d... [debian.org]
There's some rk3566 & rk3568 [including the Odroid-M1, which is relatively new] boards in there, and even the Pinebook-Pro rk3399 board.
You do NOT need to run "some random kernel fork" to run on a small ARM board.
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I came to the same conclusion you did in this case. Rockchip talks a good game but their processors never get mainlined in a timely fashion. By the time they do, I don't want to run them any more.
Also, since you mention Pine64, mine died while I wasn't even using it. It just sat around for a year and then when I finally had a use for it, it didn't work.
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You may need to define "timely fashion". Cutting Edge they ain't. and the chip vendors aren't as often involved in the upstreaming process as much as the board vendors are.
We'll see how it bears out, but Armbian claims that Orange Pi is now a sponsor, as is Banana Pi [never used any of their boards].
Pine64 A64 was one of my first SBCs [that wasn't a Pi]. still have it, still runs, but it's running "a random kernel fork" and I stopped using it. Need to upgrade to an Armbian release, but honestly can't think
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You may need to define "timely fashion".
How about "before the amount of RAM the system has onboard becomes inadequate for typical uses"?
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So I do have to admit that recently [last 3ish months, after ~2 years of use & data accumulation] my 4GB OdroidN2 running InfluxDB ran out of RAM. And I was thus forced to buy an OdroidM1 with 8GB RAM to move my biggest databases to.
Otoh, the OdroidM1 has been out for maybe a year and the board already has an upstreamed devicetree file since 2022Oct.
There are also DTS files [in Linus's tree] for the Rock-5b, but I know the upstreaming isn't complete yet and stuff is still getting merged.
I'm just not see
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Otoh, the OdroidM1 has been out for maybe a year and the board already has an upstreamed devicetree file since 2022Oct.
16 weeks warranty. Nopenopenope. If the hardware were worth a shit it would have a year like raspi or beaglebone. WAY too many reports of boards dying within six months. Same reason I wouldn't buy another Pine product.
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Re: Armbian, I have a Pinebook Pro and I replaced Manjaro with Armbian. Armbian claims to support Pinebook Pro, but in fact it wouldn't boot. I had to futz around and replace the Armbian device tree file with the one from Manjaro to get it to work.
When I mentioned this on the Armbian forum, the response was essentially "Well, we don't have that hardware, so shrug.
Point is: Armbian support is not great except maybe for a few top-tier boards. I get that the Armbian devs are volunteers and they don't ha
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Then I have very good news for you!
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/d... [debian.org]
This board is supported by debian.
https://wiki.debian.org/Instal... [debian.org]
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AFAIK, the first link is for the original Pinebook, not the Pinebook PRO, and the dtb file is the same as the one shipped with vanilla Linux. But yeah, maybe I will try installing Debian just for kicks.
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Assuming for the moment that you have the numbering of the links reversed... yes the wiki page is named after the original pinebook, and quite possibly is about that particular hardware, but it links to this
https://deb.debian.org/debian/... [debian.org]
Which has a firmware.pinebook-pro-rk3399.img.gz
Reliable and great for an Office PC (Score:2)
I have clients still running NUC's from 2014 (upgraded to Win 10 and more than the original 30GB SSD and 1 GB ram). Sold a lot of them and had very little issues. Great for office pc's with some RAM (4-8GB's) and 128 to 256 SSD where all the data is on the server..
Dual screen, wired (or WIFI) and 4 USB ports - perfect for an office worker. I'll miss them.
I like mine a lot (Score:2)
I had one running as a proxmox server for a few years. Worked great. Then I added another one offsite (at a friend's) as a Proxmox backupserver.
Recently I got two more as a mediapc and a standard win11 workstations.
That's 4 in total!
Great stuff.