Yeah, I think anyone w/ old Jetsons knows what it's like to be left high and dry by Nvidia's embedded software support. Older models are basically just ewaste. Since the Digits won't be out until May, I guess there's enough time to wait and see - at least to get a sense of what the actual specs are. I have a feeling the FP16 TFLOPS and the MBW are going to be much lower than what people have been hyping themselves up for.
Sadly, my feeling is that the big Strix Halo SKUs (which have no scheduled release dates) aren't going to be competitively priced (they're likely to be at a big FLOPS/real-world performance disadvantage, and there's still the PITA factor), but there is something appealing about about the do-it-all aspect of it.
DIGITS looks like a serious attempt, but they don’t have too much of an incentive to have people developing for older hardware. I wouldn’t expect them to supor it for more than five years. At least the underlying Ubuntu will last more than that and provide a viable work environment far beyond the time it gets really boring.
Getting their kernel mods upstreamed is very unlikely, but they might provide just enough you can build a new kernel with the same major version number.
Sadly, my feeling is that the big Strix Halo SKUs (which have no scheduled release dates) aren't going to be competitively priced (they're likely to be at a big FLOPS/real-world performance disadvantage, and there's still the PITA factor), but there is something appealing about about the do-it-all aspect of it.