So far my experience with Banana Pi products has been of great hardware, at great price point, but miserable software to the point of frustration. The best help always comes from good samaritans on GH releasing experimental builds that somehow work, but you have to actively look for them. Anyone with better luck than me has pointers to solid B-PI resources?
This has been the same story with all ARM boards for at least a decade. They have promising specs, atrocious linux support, and it never improves no matter what. Get a x86 APU2 and just run mainline linux on it, they're the same price as the ARM board but have perfect compatibility with everything.
To be fair it mostly looks that way because ARM has ruled the market for at least a decade, and there's just so many of them. But yes, many vendors make no effort to mainline their code.
But some do, or pay those samaritans to, and as a result you can definitely get boards (including this kind of 5-port switches) that run completely supported on a mainline kernel.
My home gateway is a Turris Omnia, supported in mainline for years. I run a plain Debian on it, works great.
I have 3 Olimexino A20 Boards running on Debian stable without any external repos/software.
All hardware for an audio/web/django/email/xmpp/backup server is running fine for years.
I've been using one of these to run pfSense (and recently OPNSense) for years now. Has given me zero issues. Also easily handles acting as a VPN server. Less powerful devices tend to be bottlenecked on how fast the VPN connection is by the speed of the processor (I think AES-NI is helping a lot here).
There are quite a few on ebay if you're desperate for one. Probably won't find the newer 4-NIC models, though.
Ebay or a licensed reseller (if there are any) should be easier anyways. I remember them requiring a VAT ID for EU customers. I ordered a couple for a small business so that was no problem back then but private individuals are pretty much out of luck.
