Am I the only one who is enormously sketched out by pretty much any SBC requiring an OS put out by the hardware vendor, active support or no?

A lot of these vendors are overseas, do not share my values around open source, and may well look at my computing activity as a potential data mine to be sold.

Maybe I have trust issues. But if I can't install some community OS out of the box without relying on vendor binary blobs, I don't buy the SBC.

I have the same issues with trusting whatever random vendor. Unfortunately even Raspberrypi OS'es come with some blobs...

imo it's more a driver thing than an os thing.

I can get arch/slack to work on weird hardware, what I can't do is get the promised hardware performance without specific (usually semi-closed) hardware drivers.

If you're relying on , say, rockchip features -- then you're boned without their support -- this is already a big enough heartach without the malware/data-mine angle (which is likely just as valid.)