The Rock5B is whipping the Pi on compute power and availability. Only use a Pi if you absolutely have to.

At $150+ I would just buy an old small form factor dell / hp from ebay and have a whole machine.

I bought a retired dual-socket Xeon HP 1U server on ebay with 128GB of ECC RAM for like $50 on ebay a while back. It only had one CPU, but upgrading it to two would be very cheap.

Sure, it's hulking, obsolete, and very loud beast, but it's hard to beat the price to performance ratio there... just make sure you don't put anything super valuable on it because HP's old proliant firmware likely has a ton of unpatched critical vulnerabilities (and you'd need an HP support plan to download patches even if they exist)

100% this.

I picked up a HP 705 G4 mini on backmarket for $80 shipped the other day to run Home Assistant and some other small local containers. 500gb ram, Ryzen 5 2400GE, 8gb ddr4 w/ a valid windows license.

Sure it's not as small or silent, but there's no way to beat the prices of these few-years old enterprise mini-pc's

There are other CM-compatible SoMs.

Like the Pine64 SOQUARTZ

Geerling covers this in the accompanying video for this post. He couldn't get it running due to no working OS images being obtainable.

I spent some time last week tinkering with a SOQuartz board and ended up getting it working with a Pine-focused distro called Plebian[1].

Took awhile to land on it though. Before that I tried all of the other distros on Pine64's "SOQuartz Software Releases"[2] page without any luck. The only one on that page that booted was the linked "Armbian Ubuntu Jammy with kernel 5.19.7" but it failed to boot again after an apt upgrade.

So there's at least one working OS, as of last week. But its definitely quite finicky and would probably need some work to build a proper device tree for any carrier board that's not the RPi CM4 Carrier Board.

[1] https://github.com/Plebian-Linux/quartz64-images

[2] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/SOQuartz_Software_Releases

So you can get those compute units are obtainable, but a functioning image remains unobtanium. What a mess.

You can usually get an image that functions at least partially, but it's up to you to determine whether the amount it functions is enough for your use case. A K3s setup is usually good to go without some features like display output.

I like to tinker, but there is a limit.

The killer feature for their go fund would be is if they sourced a batch of pi compute modules ...

I've asked about that. There's a small possibility, but the earliest it would be able to happen (a batch of CM4 to offer as add-ons) would be summer, most likely :(

I don’t think these boards are meant for the way people are trying to use them. Mainline Linux support is actually great on RK3566 chips, but you have to build your own images with buildroot or something like that.