what is the rock64 good for?

[munocat]

I have a 4GB Rock 64, and it fails my 2 main uses

use 

1  youtube playback, I have no audio, A/V does not work, nor does a Bluetooth adapter.  
2 seti@home. Fails with computational errors. 

PINE64 does not care for supporting software, always says COMMUNITY, but there is not much community support.

I feel like I got ripped off. basically my ROCK64 (which has so much promise), is a lemon,

[z4v4l]

donate it for developers, will add to growing the community. these boards are made by enthusiastic people, I guess, they hardly do a lot of money of this business. it's development boards. software support is hard and it comes up only eventually, with work of many people. Pine cannot afford hiring dozens of software engineers that would polish that linux mess, thrown at them by rockchip/alwinner and (god forbid amlogic ). and also, a lot of people have found use of these boards and enjoy them, end users, not those who compile endlessly that linux. making all that stuff, which could be made with an ARM SBC. your fail isn't representative. maybe you made some mistakes, it's linux - a very rough and unfriendly environment, you need to do a lot of research by yourself to get it working (well, just working) even on a PC, on ARM boards the situation is way worse.

[psychedup]

I have two rock64's. I'm happy to tell you what mine are good for...

I'm using one as a headless NAS / mail server / Nextcloud server. I got it to replace a Raspberry PI 3B which was doing the same things. The RPI had some serious performance issues due to lack of RAM and I/O. The Rock64 just hums along and I hardly ever have any issue with it.

The 2nd one is used as a basic desktop for light browsing, and also is used as a Gentoo development machine. The 4 GB of RAM means it can build some larger packages than my 2 GB PineA64's, like Firefox and Chromium. I don't use it for media, it doesn't perform very well at things like video playback, but that's mostly because I haven't put any effort into that.

[SirRyanTheGeek]

I'm using one as a headless NAS / mail server / Nextcloud server. I got it to replace a Raspberry PI 3B which was doing the same things. The RPI had some serious performance issues due to lack of RAM and I/O. 

Same exact boat as you - one is for my Nextcloud server, the other is email - precisely for the same reason. The pi was just not responsive enough!

Although I am finding the email to be a bit of a challenge running Bionic. I am trying to use Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, OpenDKIM and Roundcube all working together. I tried using Citadel and some other pre-baked distro's and whenever I hit a problem it was mind-bending in trying to find ways to fix it. So I chucked all the "make it easy" packages and just am trying to make all the core pieces work together myself. I still have yet to figure out why the Spamassassin "milter" stuff patently refuses to install right on the Rock (could be the bionic distro not having all the requisite parts, etc.) All in all I've been using a bunch of "Roll your own email" tutorials from a guy at ArsTechnica that wrote an awesome set of articles and others - but so far it's a hair-pulling labor of love. Needless to say I have blown away the whole distro and restarted so many times it's laughable. 

I posted a question to the forum here under another thread to try and get a way to configure a microSD to boot and hand off the OS and boot from SSD after a delay (yeah, I flashed it, but it's WAY inconsistent and doesn't come up all the time - and I keep corrupting the boot volume. Go figure)

All in all? I've have fun with the Rock64 - and it's just SO damn much faster than the Pi (especially with I/O on the USB 3.0 port and over the network) Once I figure out some of these annoyances I think I will continue to be amazingly pleased.

[BowerR64]

Seems this is about the only positive post ive read around here so far.

I got a couple of these boards on the way and i came in search of a firmware to put on em.

[tomarm]

I bought mine hoping to compile Linux from Scratch on a usb3 connected hdd. I also hoped to use a light desktop like mate or xfce or maybe kde on wayland. Nope. It's been a fiasco. There are threads on every aspect of this board not working in 3 diff revisions with workarounds galore. Also many got good boards and are happy. I got a bad one. Good Luck.