Odroid C2 Challenges Raspberry Pi 3 On Hardware But Not Ecosystem (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: We are surely in the age of single-board computers as the words "Raspberry Pi" sneak into the ranks of [a] household name. Many would have thought this impossible, but for hardware enthusiasts it has wide-reaching benefits as others clamor to enter the market. The most formidable challenge made so far is by the Hardkernel Odroid C2 which bests the Pi 3 on hardware, but not everything. Odroid C2 has the same cores, running faster with more RAM. It swaps out gigabit Ethernet for the Pi 3's somewhat unimpressive Wi-Fi chip. And it includes onboard eMMC (useful for faster booting) as well as an SD card slot. Odroid C2's hardware is clearly a better offering than Pi 3 for just $5 more (as we saw from the benchmarks last week), but that's not the entire story. It's further down Linux stream for a less mature distro, and has nowhere near the community support that has opened the Pi [up] to just about everyone. But it is the hardware geek's SBC with the layman's price tag and that's a very interesting indicator of where we are with low-cost computing.

Comments

Not a fan of Odroid

[spire3661]

Even disregarding the community aspect, Odroid runs a weirdo/old software stack. If it was running something more akin to Raspbian which is pretty close to mainline Debian, i would be more interested in it. I dont even like using Adafruit's custom raspbian images they provide with their ~3" TFT screens.

Higher Specs look good on Paper

[wisnoskij]

Higher Specs look good on paper, but are not nearly as important as stability and well written software. I have the original version that looked amazing next to the pi 2. But it crashes all the time and the only video player that works on it is Kodi.