Hey! Author of the post someone linked here. Fair comment, though this wasn't really meant to be a review, or "go buy this!" type of post, it was more to highlight what I tested from the boards released in 2025 and share the results to those benchmarks via sbc.compare
Armbian do a great job of handling support for a whole host of boards (including most I included in this list), so you'll usually have Debian/Ubuntu-based flavours. Vendor kernels and vendor supplied images will be hit and miss. Mainline Linux support is a flag you filter by on the benchmark comparison site linked in the article, but it's a difficult one to keep up to date and define exactly. It could have some kind of support, but miss out on display functionality, or WiFi yada yada. What would we then class as having mainline support? All hardware etc functioning? If so, very, very few will meet that definition.
I get the desire for the information, and perhaps I should have envisioned these types of questions, but all I initially meant for the post to be was a recap for people following me to see which boards I'd tested that were released last year :D
> All hardware etc functioning?
If your standard is "supports suspend/resume", there's even plenty of laptops that won't meet it.
That gave me a laugh.
Suspend / resume? I'll settle for "keyboard works".
(From what I've learned so far, some magic incantation is required to convince Linux that a Lifebook E559 is a laptop not a tablet. I'm finding I have way less patience with these side-quests as I get older.)
That laptop has an 8th gen Intel processor which should make it completely compatible with the Linux kernel, yet surprisingly it’s not. https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=2ec391ffdc Did Fujitsu choose an obscure component or interface?
Even on random ARM boards, it's not usually the CPU that's the problem. (It's generally drivers for everything else; eg. a sensor hub that should tell you when a laptop is in tablet mode)
Yeah, my implication was that the 8th gen CPU's platform controller hub should be supported. I should have explicitly rather than implicitly stated that.
Interesting: Despite its name Armbian seems to support RISC-V.
Disclaimer: I have never used any RISC-V board.
In addition to https://armbian.com one could also cross check with Diet-Pi, which got resurrected from dormancy sometime in the last years.
https://dietpi.com