<story><title>Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35</title><url>https://www.unihiker.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>snarfy</author><text>Why does it need continuous, perpetual support?  Most devices like this get built, software installed, and never updated again. When is the last time you updated the ECU software in your car?  I built a small arcade cabinet using an old raspberry pi 2b.  Once I built it I&amp;#x27;ve never needed to upgrade anything on it.  It works fine and plays all the old games.  I have backups of the SD card in case anything craps out.</text></item><item><author>theamk</author><text>My usual question for small cheap boards is: what will happen to OS support in 3 years? Is it using regular distro or is this a custom fork which will likely be never updated? The website says:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The UNIHIKER comes with a Linux operating system based on Debian and various built-in features, which will be upgraded from time to time.&lt;p&gt;... don&amp;#x27;t expect OS upgrades here. If you want to play with it for a while then put it away forever, go ahead and do it; but if you want to build something long-term, better find a different board.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theamk</author><text>Few years ago, you built your arcade cabinet, and decided to put some nice launcher like RetroPie. It works fine for a few years, and then your friends tell you about Pico8 support.. nice, it is supported by RetroPie release! not nice: retropie requires ubuntu 18.04 or later.. let&amp;#x27;s hope your device supports it.&lt;p&gt;Few years ago, you built a weather station. Sadly, the weather backend you had was discontinued. You found a great new one, and it even comes with SDK and sample code! Sadly, the SDK requires python 3.8 or later. Does your device support it?&lt;p&gt;Few years ago, you built the home automation server. But recently, you got the set of remotely-controllable disco balls for each room which use FOOBAR protocol. Good news: Linux kernel supports FOOBAR protocol since 5.14. Bad news: your device kernel is much older.&lt;p&gt;Few years ago, you built the smart controller. You don&amp;#x27;t want to manage your infra, so you decided to go with AWS IOT, it is super each if you only have a few devices. But AWS announced they are dropping AWS IOT.. does your OS support newer system?&lt;p&gt;There are definitely cases when you set up the device once and never have to touch it again, but there are also a lot of networked things out there, and you often want to control them..</text></comment>
<story><title>Unihiker, an $80 single-board PC with 2.8“ touchscreen, quad-core ARM Cortex-A35</title><url>https://www.unihiker.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>snarfy</author><text>Why does it need continuous, perpetual support?  Most devices like this get built, software installed, and never updated again. When is the last time you updated the ECU software in your car?  I built a small arcade cabinet using an old raspberry pi 2b.  Once I built it I&amp;#x27;ve never needed to upgrade anything on it.  It works fine and plays all the old games.  I have backups of the SD card in case anything craps out.</text></item><item><author>theamk</author><text>My usual question for small cheap boards is: what will happen to OS support in 3 years? Is it using regular distro or is this a custom fork which will likely be never updated? The website says:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The UNIHIKER comes with a Linux operating system based on Debian and various built-in features, which will be upgraded from time to time.&lt;p&gt;... don&amp;#x27;t expect OS upgrades here. If you want to play with it for a while then put it away forever, go ahead and do it; but if you want to build something long-term, better find a different board.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scheeseman486</author><text>If there&amp;#x27;s a vulnerability in any of the software or firmware that connects and interfaces with anything over a network, there&amp;#x27;s the possibility of something worming it&amp;#x27;s way in or out of it.&lt;p&gt;For something intermittently used like a game box that might not matter. For IoT-focused hardware that is connected to the internet continuously by design where, say, a malformed TCP packet could cause a buffer overflow in the network stack that wiggles it&amp;#x27;s way into root code execution by chaining through a bunch of unpatched vulnerabilities on a &amp;quot;never updated again&amp;quot; system? That&amp;#x27;s a problem.</text></comment>