Just a few notes on recent experience buying a UV-5RH and programming it from a Linux platform. TL;DNR it works eventually.

So, I have a 2-year old Debian-based Linux with a pretty old version of Chirp on it, works fine for the UV-5R and BF-888 I have. I ordered a UV-5RH which arrived after 2 weeks of shipping from China.

Trying to upgrade to the newest Chirp, there are instructions here: https://chirpmyradio.com/projects/chirp/wiki/ChirpOnLinux

However, my version of Debian is 11.7, only a little over a year old, but the recommended installer from the link above (pipx) isn't available in the repositories. You can find a way of installing pipx via pip which IS in the repositories, but then if you try to install the python package as suggested pipx install --system-site-packages ./chirp-yyyymmdd-py3-none-any.whl it turns out that the installed version of python isn't high enough.

So I turned to a different device which had a younger version of Debian on it with a higher Python release, and tried installing the latest xxxx.whl package. It installed but segfaulted and printed a stack trace when run.

Much digging later, someone else is reporting the same problem and had reverted to the version-before-current and that worked.

And so it proved for me. I finally managed to get the rig programmed using Chirp, selecting Baofeng 5RM from the drop-down (if I remember correctly, I'm pretty certain is was 5RM but did not note that accurately) and using a less bleeding-edge Chirp version.

I'm very grateful to the Chirp developers so I'm not going to be super-critical here, but please be aware that compatibilty with older OS releases or versions of Python is clearly not a high priority for them and release testing seems to be a bit sketchy.

I've had very good results with Chirp before. This post is intended to alert those who might be having issues that there is a route to getting it working and it may save someone some time.

Finally noting that whilst the Chirp source appears available in a tarball, if there is an obvious route to installing from source, that route is obscure and I had no luck discovering what it is.