"But... "Proper Linux" is a huge difference and well worth the... "
Proper Linux is only worth the difference if you can actually fit the OS and your application in the available RAM (good luck) and the part has mainstream kernel support and available documentation. Otherwise you are buying into a literally throwaway platform that will become a useless piece of e-junk the moment the vendor stops updating their copy of Linux with patched in various binary blobs necessary to make the thing work.
The VoCore website only links to binaries, no source code (only some patch files) for their kernels and OpenWRT builds (GPL?), the wifi driver Github has "This feed enable using MTK/Ralink official wifi driver for the latest linux kernel 4.14/openwrt." in the description - current mainline is at 6.5.3 ...
Their OpenWRT binaries are also ancient - the latest they offer for download is 19.07.03 which is 3 years old. Not great, given what this is meant to be used for. I guess security is not high on their priority list.
Also the amount of chinglish on the website ("note: normally, we upgrade or fix brick are using Firmware. Flash Image is a clone of the full flash, for professional usage only. ") doesn't exactly bode well for good quality English documentation availability.
Ship an ancient, outdated Linux or Android image, no or incomplete sources, poor or no English documentation - and good luck to anyone trying to make such board work.
The hardware could be the best in the world - but this poor ecosystem support is the bane of most Chinese SBC and the reason why almost everyone uses Raspberry Pi, despite it certainly not being neither the cheapest, most powerful or having lowest power consumption.
I literally ran a Linux VPS for years on 256MB of RAM.
128MB is plenty. Throw down Busybox and cut some corners, run uClib rather than glibc, etc. etc. You'll be surprised what fits in there.
My 256MB Linux VPS was Apache + Bash, full scale Linux. There's plenty of room there. 128MB is small for a "mainstream" Linux / Ubuntu install, but 128MB isn't even "Linux from Scratch" levels of size.
Linux from Scratch is probably like 32MB or so RAM needed. And that's still "kit" Linux (IE: a prebaked "kit" where the OSS community already made a bunch of optimizations for you, but no application-specific optimization decisions yet), not even going into difficult levels of optimization yet.
> The hardware could be the best in the world - but this poor ecosystem support is the bane of most Chinese SBC and the reason why almost everyone uses Raspberry Pi, despite it certainly not being neither the cheapest, most powerful or having lowest power consumption.
EDIT: I think you have a fine point on this front. I know that MIPS chips are still available from some manufacturers (like Microchip's PIC-line), and I think they're Linux compatible. That might be a better way to go. But this ~128MB "sized" Linux instance seems perfectly usable to me. Good softare/Linux support would be preferred of course.
i replaced a 200 mhz 512k ram mips mpu with one of these same chips to great effect and at reduced cost.
thinking everyone uses raspberry pis (while mostly true in hobby) ignores a very large segment of very real and very active embedded dev getting to the point MPUs are at cost in design bumps etc
Proper Linux is only worth the difference if you can actually fit the OS and your application in the available RAM (good luck) and the part has mainstream kernel support and available documentation. Otherwise you are buying into a literally throwaway platform that will become a useless piece of e-junk the moment the vendor stops updating their copy of Linux with patched in various binary blobs necessary to make the thing work.
The VoCore website only links to binaries, no source code (only some patch files) for their kernels and OpenWRT builds (GPL?), the wifi driver Github has "This feed enable using MTK/Ralink official wifi driver for the latest linux kernel 4.14/openwrt." in the description - current mainline is at 6.5.3 ...
Their OpenWRT binaries are also ancient - the latest they offer for download is 19.07.03 which is 3 years old. Not great, given what this is meant to be used for. I guess security is not high on their priority list.
Also the amount of chinglish on the website ("note: normally, we upgrade or fix brick are using Firmware. Flash Image is a clone of the full flash, for professional usage only. ") doesn't exactly bode well for good quality English documentation availability.
Ship an ancient, outdated Linux or Android image, no or incomplete sources, poor or no English documentation - and good luck to anyone trying to make such board work.
The hardware could be the best in the world - but this poor ecosystem support is the bane of most Chinese SBC and the reason why almost everyone uses Raspberry Pi, despite it certainly not being neither the cheapest, most powerful or having lowest power consumption.