Hey Hacky,
couple points there. Yes, I was glad but also a bit surprised to hear the Pi being recommended as the ideal platform but OTOH, the thing about such SBCs, as you've hinted at, is that they are so affordable that you can use them as single-purpose machines which helps a lot with a lot of applications, including leonArdo. We definitely don't recommend doing anything besides running leonArdo on a Pi.
Yeah, i just wanted to clear things a bit up from my side of experience (and even tell, that not every small sized X86_64 board might really fit depending on the usage).
I have the nagging feeling, however, that us strongly recommending swapspace for the Pi also has something to do with things running so smoothly there. We're still seeing those memory fragmentation issues that drive up memory usage over time, so having basically unlimited swap space will help on every machine but on the Pi, it's an absolute necessity to have ample swap space. So bottom line, just install swapspace when running leonArdo, because why not.
Well, i personally thought that having at least some bits of swapspace would be or should be common sense on linux machines at all, except your physical ram exceeds your peak usage by far (for example, if you have 64 or 128gig of ram, you might be happy w/o swap at all, but if you have 32gig at a desktop, having additional 16gig of swap will keep you from getting trouble.
)
The Pi 1 and Zero you mentioned don't support ARMv7, so they don't run leonArdo anyway! But yes, part of the reason why we didn't even consider them is the fact that the resources will be even more restricted and the Pi 3 is really affordable anyway. I haven't looked into the RK3399 you mentioned but if you're looking for a board that you can buy right now, the Banana Pi M2 and M3 have SATA and they're proven to run leonArdo. I also just got a Rock64 on my desk and while I haven't gotten around to testing leonArdo on it, with Gigabit Ethernet and eMMC I think it's quite promising. Excited to try it anyway!
Well, i have a banana pi M1 sitting here, but with only 1 gig of ram, i will probably not have to much fun with leonArdo on it. Maybe i will try it just for fun and see how far i will come with it.
The board i had mostly in my mind as i talked about RK3399 SBCs was the upcoming Firefly-RK3399 which you can find over here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1771382379/firefly-rk3399-six-core-64-bit-high-performance-plI'm very interested in this particular board because it seems to be a pretty powerful little machine. But sadly, somewhat costly too.
General note in case anyone's still reading: we're always interested in hearing your stories with different setups, especially when they're ARM! But be aware that ARM is such a diverse ecosystem that you never know how things turn out and while we want to hear how things go for you, we can't really support you with anything but the Raspberry Pi. So ARM is very much a "only if you know what you're doing" kind of affair!
Best,
Christian
Overall, as i said above, i just wanted to clear things a bit up, because just saying that a Raspi will be a good setup seemed a bit short on the informational side at all. But i don't wanted to say it's a bad idea, just that you should know at least a bit more about what leonArdo needs anyway... And that most of that is not only big fat CPU and tons of RAM but even a lot of I/O capabilities, especially on the networking side.
(Which is a point where i restrict myself on my setup because leonArdo not only uses the network for the uplink to the exchange APIs but even for any and all display usage _and_ any inputs).
Well, i think, it's a good thing that we put some more light on that topic from different sides and that might actually help some people to get the right choice for their setup.
Greetings,
hacky