I don't see Broadcom supporting their chips very well with the Raspberry Pi, you basically can't use most of the boards functionality on Debian without adding a bunch of blobs.
Wrt community, linux-sunxi and Armbian are both in better states than the Raspberry Pi community on their forums or on Reddit, if I google for dhclient issues with the Raspberry Pi I'm gonna get nowhere fast on fixing said issues.
This is the same for every ARM board if you want multimedia support. (Because these companies do not allow you to publish their IP)
Ofc if you only connect a punch of hard drives to it and a ethernet cable you are not gonna appreciate what possibilities a Raspberry Pi and their quite open software stack are able to offer you. Get a camera and hardware encoding involved in your tinkering and you will have a bad time for sure.
Uhh, when you actually talk to Allwinner, they are generally pretty helpful unless its not their IP to give. I've emailed Tyle at Allwinner in the past to clear up some chunks of code in the kernel 3.4 BSP, and I found most of the time the code was intended to be under GPLv2, which he clarified.
How is libmmal for the Raspberry Pi's camera libre by the way? The license looks to be proprietary, definitely the opposite of open.
Well, I can easily use, for example, Plan 9 or RISC OS, on a Raspberry Pi without any porting effort whatsoever. Some of us have use cases that do not simply involve Linux.
I am more interested in GPIO support in embedded boards. With RaspPi it is very probable that I will find a snippet to read a specific temperature sensor via I2C or bit banging for example. For the rest of the options (orange pi, banana pi, even odroid, etc) I have not heard such good things.
Literally, once I got my Pi, I got a DHT22 from my arduino box and in less than 3 minutes I could read it.
You can access GPIO, I2C, UART via standard kernel interfaces. Which is the whole point of the kernel. Learn those and you can use the code on any SBC running Linux.
