<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>squarefoot</author><text>Broadly speaking, I would not rely too much on support from manufacturers but rather by the communities when the projects are stable enough. Manufacturers have the tendency to slow or halt support in a few years because it costs them money, or to push newer products, while communities support usually lasts much longer.&lt;p&gt;For example, the NanoPi NEO Core official images all still use a 4.14 kernel (2017-2018), while the ones at Armbian use the current mainline 5.10.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.friendlyarm.com&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;NanoPi_NEO_Core#Install_OS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.friendlyarm.com&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;NanoPi_NEO_Core#...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.armbian.com&amp;#x2F;nanopi-neo&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.armbian.com&amp;#x2F;nanopi-neo&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>szszrk</author><text>Are additional RAM gigabytes anything important for a switch? Especially one that delivers on the parameters?&lt;p&gt;Does BPI-R2 actually supports those distributions, or rather those distributions &amp;quot;can run&amp;quot; on that hardware? That&amp;#x27;s a difference. OpenWRT can be run on Mikrotik, yet Mikrotik doesn&amp;#x27;t support that. OpenBSD runs on Edgerouter, yet I doubt they support that. Will anyone that I will buy BPI-R2 from, fix my &amp;quot;normal distribution&amp;quot; if it fails to detect some hardware, or with a failed upgrade?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an awesome device but I think we are confusing a few important things here. Like the word &amp;quot;support&amp;quot; for a start.</text></item><item><author>teleforce</author><text>Both specs for MicroTik and Ubiquiti EdgerouterX are much inferior to BPI-R2 Pro, for example EdgerouterX (currently out of stock) only supports 256MB RAM while the latter can support up to 4GB RAM.&lt;p&gt;Another is that I believe RPI-R2 can support the mainline Linux kernel with normal distributions (e.g. Ubuntu), do MikroTik and EdgerouterX support that as well in addition to OpenWRT?</text></item><item><author>oarsinsync</author><text>Isn’t that already true of various MikroTik 5 port boards, as well as the Ubiquiti EdgerouterX?&lt;p&gt;Both of which are a similar price point, and include a case by default.</text></item><item><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>&amp;gt; 5x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports (1x WAN, 4x LAN) using Realtek RTL8367RB-VB-CG switch&lt;p&gt;So that should allow full speed switching (if not routing) without touching CPU, right? That&amp;#x27;d be a welcome touch in a network box</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Low Cost Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro 5-Port Gigabit Ethernet Router Board</title><url>https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/08/30/banana-pi-bpi-r2-pro-5-port-gigabit-ethernet-router-board-rockchip-rk3568/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>vladvasiliu</author><text>&amp;gt; Are additional RAM gigabytes anything important for a switch? Especially one that delivers on the parameters?&lt;p&gt;For a &lt;i&gt;switch&lt;/i&gt;, probably not. But it does open up a bunch of possibilities for some constrained environments.&lt;p&gt;I would use such a thing combined with a few other services aside from pure network switching. Off the top of my head, I&amp;#x27;m thinking running pi-hole and Home Assistant.&lt;p&gt;Why? Because I live in a studio apartment, and it would be a single, small and quiet box. I&amp;#x27;m currently doing this on a mini-ITX J3455, and while the setup is broadly OK, I&amp;#x27;d love to be able to remove the switch I have lying around. Also, the integrated Realtek controllers suck, and I can&amp;#x27;t replace them with anything better (there&amp;#x27;s no PCIe port).&lt;p&gt;Of course, your other points absolutely matter, and are the reason why I&amp;#x27;m still looking around for quiet x86 machines that I could expand.</text><parent_chain><item><author>szszrk</author><text>Are additional RAM gigabytes anything important for a switch? Especially one that delivers on the parameters?&lt;p&gt;Does BPI-R2 actually supports those distributions, or rather those distributions &amp;quot;can run&amp;quot; on that hardware? That&amp;#x27;s a difference. OpenWRT can be run on Mikrotik, yet Mikrotik doesn&amp;#x27;t support that. OpenBSD runs on Edgerouter, yet I doubt they support that. Will anyone that I will buy BPI-R2 from, fix my &amp;quot;normal distribution&amp;quot; if it fails to detect some hardware, or with a failed upgrade?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an awesome device but I think we are confusing a few important things here. Like the word &amp;quot;support&amp;quot; for a start.</text></item><item><author>teleforce</author><text>Both specs for MicroTik and Ubiquiti EdgerouterX are much inferior to BPI-R2 Pro, for example EdgerouterX (currently out of stock) only supports 256MB RAM while the latter can support up to 4GB RAM.&lt;p&gt;Another is that I believe RPI-R2 can support the mainline Linux kernel with normal distributions (e.g. Ubuntu), do MikroTik and EdgerouterX support that as well in addition to OpenWRT?</text></item><item><author>oarsinsync</author><text>Isn’t that already true of various MikroTik 5 port boards, as well as the Ubiquiti EdgerouterX?&lt;p&gt;Both of which are a similar price point, and include a case by default.</text></item><item><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>&amp;gt; 5x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports (1x WAN, 4x LAN) using Realtek RTL8367RB-VB-CG switch&lt;p&gt;So that should allow full speed switching (if not routing) without touching CPU, right? That&amp;#x27;d be a welcome touch in a network box</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Low Cost Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro 5-Port Gigabit Ethernet Router Board</title><url>https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/08/30/banana-pi-bpi-r2-pro-5-port-gigabit-ethernet-router-board-rockchip-rk3568/</url></story>