Why to use Raspian insted of Debian?

giaur500

Hi,
I'm curious guys, why do you even want to use Raspbian insetad of Debian armhf? You must know, that raspian is compiled for older architecture that Raspberry Pi use. So you will notice huge performance loss in compare to regular Debian armhf, because Debian's armhf uses newer arm instruction set, available on OrangePi and not on older cpu architecture used in RaspberryPI.


Also, Raspbian is based on Debian Testing. With regular Debian armhf you can even eaisly upgrade to Debian Sid, with Debian's official repos. So you can get newest software available (Unstable/Experiemtnal), unlike Respian.

I personally can't see any single reason for use Raspbian instead of Debian. Can you give me any reason why that Raspbian port to OrangePI does even exists?

bronco

The reason why vendors combine a rootfs containing slow ARMv6 code with kernel/bootloader for an ARMv7 capable device is simple and applies to all those $insert-your-favourite-fruit Pis: You can trick current Raspberry Pi users into believing they would get full compatibility (especially software support) with this other Pi thing.

And then they use a slow distro and run into every single problem that can be expected with such an approach: You find informations on the net that you've to alter config.txt in Raspbian to achieve this and that just to realize that this file will be read by the Raspberry Pi's VPU prior to booting the ARM cores and therefore altering it has zero effects on different hardware platforms than the RPis. And so on... it's important that potential customers realize the amount of incompatibilities between the original RPi's and the many $insert-your-favourite-fruit Pis after they bought the new device. And that's what Raspbian is for: Creating the impression that these various other Pis are fully compatible to RPi.

giaur500

Lol, yes this is what I suspected.

boldive

I fully agree. Orange Pi uses well known business model: "Bite and Switch". It would be much better if they will deliver "another pi" with new unique name and deliver Orange Pi as alternative to other platform without magic words "compatible and support".