[yjftsjthsd-h]

As the author notes,

> Here’s the fun bit: as of right now, there are essentially zero RVA23-compliant RISC-V boards you can actually buy. They’re coming – a handful of promising-looking boards from Sipeed, Milk-V, Banana Pi and others are expected around April/May 2026 – but they’re not on shelves yet. Even the Orange Pi RV2, released in March 2025, is RVA20 only, which means it already can’t run Ubuntu 25.10. Ouch.

I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu or Snaps to say how much of a pain it would be to just use an older OS version, but if someone is in the Ubuntu ecosystem I certainly wouldn't blame them for not wanting to spend money on hardware that the OS has already deprecated.

(And IMHO the complete lack of available hardware means that Ubuntu made a poor choice here, but that's rather beside the point; this author is working inside a specific existing ecosystem, and their choices seem reasonable in that context.)

Although, thinking further.... I do wonder if it wouldn't be better to explicitly use RVA20 with a compatible OS (probably Ubuntu 24.04) in order to ship binaries that are as compatible as possible. Like, if you ship a snap that uses RVA23 instructions, your app won't work on existing hardware, right? (Whether that hardware is running Ubuntu 20.04, or Debian, or Gentoo, or...)