On 2021-03-07 11:14 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
And subsidized shipping. It is often cheaper to mail from China or Hong Kong than from within Toronto.
Canada's mail pricing is iniquitous. I sent a Raspberry Pi Pico (okay, and a tiny piezo speaker so it would play the rickroll tune when plugged in …) to Halifax, NS the other week. Small padded bag, 35 grams: $18. I've also had DHL be faster from China than Canada Post's fastest service can make it across Toronto.
- Often one version of Ubuntu is made to run and that's it. It is custom (because booting every board is different; DTree has helped but not fixed the problem). It's rarely updated.
- drivers are never upstreamed by the board-maker or the SoC maker. Sometimes by volunteer reverse engineers (eg. linux-sunxi.org)
- there is no support except by enthusiasts
Those are the biggies. A supportive manufacturer and community is worth the extra. The Banana Pi folks managed to cause one of the Raspberry Pi hardware developers to nope out of the community for a couple of years because they'd modified his Raspberry Pi GPIO library just enough to work with one model of Banana Pi ... but left his name as the support contact. He got so fed up with angry, entitled support requests that he quit coding and became an artisanal baker. cheers, Stewart