They are just showing you that you don’t need to spend $2000 on Autocad and other listed software, because Zorin has all these open source tools bundled in it.

Though tbh replacing Autocad or office365 with FOSS alternatives are bold claims because these alternatives just aren’t viable in a commercial environment.

Thanks for your reply. Honestly what I’m asking for does not really exist. You have to pick from features, open source and plug-and-play-ness. Usually you can get 2 of the 3 but it’s hard to get all three. So although I wouldn’t buy this PC, it’s a pretty good recommendation for stumbling on this post in the future.

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I don’t think the Orange Pi 5 Plus is mainline Linux ready, or at least the RK3588 is not there yet so it seems to me that it’s more of a hacky board. I don’t think the Zimaboard is open source but it seems pretty good although I personally would buy a coreboot compatible small form factor PC if I went x86.

Thank you very much! This is probably the best answer.

For anyone from the future reading this: From my understanding almost every SBC does not really work with “Linus Torvalds’ Linux” which is why one often sees HW manufacturers also providing their own Linux image with the computer. This is fine for development but honestly not something I would want for self hosting stuff. There are few exceptions like the Raspberry Pi but that one is not that much open source. So imo the best option is to look at https://ubuntu.com/download/risc-v where Ubuntu provides “official” images for few RISC-V boards. (The Visionfive 2 is what lead me there.)

Thanks, does it have mainline linux support though? I know I am kinda repeating myself but that is probably the most important point as I am not really a good hacker so I don’t really want to buy hacky solutions.

Ok that’s good then. Thanks for the reply!