Well, so much for that I guess
Yeah its really too bad. I used to love the company but now I just don’t see them making things for hobbies. Anyone know of some good alternatives? Ive heard good things about lepotato?
They were never about hobbies. We were a niche that they were happy to have, but they never cared. Origionally it was about education (which has a large overlap with hobbies so they served well).
Libreboard
OrangePI
I had one and returned it. The hardware was good but the software was total ass
That’s the biggest issue. Support.
Most of the success of the RPi is due to rasparian and community support.
The official ones are a mess, but depending on your needs, you can use armbian. It supports orange pi boards, and is a nice and up to date distro.
My guess is that I tried 6 or more OSes on it. Like 2 would run at all, and in every case there kept being a lot of issues. It felt like it was hardware no one cares about supporting except one dude who made a version of Ubuntu for it. The whole damned experience was janky AF.
Got a RPi 5 and was able to get Arch running on it and it feels faster despite being objectively slower than the OPi
Never take software from a hardware company.
I sank a ton of time trying to get several OSes running on it, including that one, with almost no luck. Out of the few that even did run, there were always piles of issues. You assumed I only meant the official OSes but I didn’t.
Out of ignorance I literally thought this was a joke. “Orange you glad I didn’t say raspberry?”
Arduinos all the way down I guess
Lattepanda mu is apparently a very powerful alternative.
Yeah but most rpi projects don’t need a powerful alternative. I don’t need a full computer to run octoprint… But it’s still too hard and pricy to get a RPi
Bigtreetech’s btt pi is quite good for printer use - and general use tbh, but it is geared towards printers
Radxa for RISC-V SBCs with GPIO.
Have a couple boards and the software support leaves a lot to be desired. Armenian is a godsend, but sadly cannot fill every gap.
I have been using Odroid boards for many years. I currently have 3 C4 boards and 1 older C1 board. My kids use them as their computer in their rooms. Hardkernel is the company behind the boards, they also provided the official Home assistant blue devices that came pre installed with HASS.
Oh! Great idea - kid’s computer. I’ll be stealing that for my next project. Thank you!
The only downside I see with LePotato is that it has no SteamLink client (for now). Otherwise, there are plenty of OSes made for it. I have one SD card for CoreELEC to watch things on the TV, and one with Batocera for game emulators.
Orange or banana pi
I had so many ideas for things we could use these for that completely revolutionize what is now a terrible user experience. No idea how to implement on these ideas, but it’s a start I guess.
Any N300 based PC is under $200, tiny, low watts, faster than a Pi5, and can run any distro because it’s a regular PC.
The pandemic shortage marked the end of the RPi as a hobbyist board. All the stock when to companies, and every hobbyist shop jacked the prices, and scalpers even more.
I’m using a lepotato for Home Assistant. Works very well for months now, but I’m a bit worried about long term distro support
Do arduino stuff or look up chips with those cortexm0 arm processors. Like these: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3403
I honestly never thought I’d see this day. It’s like announcing Linux just went closed source!
A moment of silence for the company that once connected hobbyists with affordable hardware. It was never perfect, but the profound impact on makers and industry is undeniable.
I will remember you for what you once were, not what you came to be.
2024 is going to be the year of
the Linux Desktopenshittification. When anything you love goes public, you won’t be loving it for much longer.And thus begins “why isn’t the profit line going up?” phase of the company
At faster growth rates each quarter!
Just growth isn’t enough, we have to make sure our growth rate itself is growing!
Keep differentiating that shit forever!
Nope, it has been ongoing since 2013. From Adobe stopping physical sales of Creative Suite, to the Xbox One being announced, to Apple flattening iOS to the point of it looking like ass, the enshittification has started at this point in time. And their excuse was to be “more modern”, my ass.
eh, i actually like flat design. just me, though.
Good for you.
Eh, the only thing that made RPi better than the alternatives was the size of the community and the amount of testing done for their hardware.
RIP.
Looking forward to whatever SBCs the community migrates to in the next year or so.
The new ones are power hungry expensive monsters anyway. There are cheaper clones out there and I had pretty much decided never to pay for the gucci brand anymore.
I’ve had lots of fun with the very affordable Pi Zero 2w. Will pick up a few more before they disappear.
Can you hook up a screen to those and run python?
Yes indeed.
The last project I did with one was build a moon and tide clock - all written in python with a motor controller, external display and individually addressable led lighting.
They’re also great as diy audio streaming devices for whole home audio.
Excellent! The (cheap) i96 pi had all but a video output so I never got it to work…
Cool project, how do you display the tide (upcoming, there, outgoing etc)? Do you have some battery to the clock or how do you set the date/time?
Edit : is it some sort of regular python (3?) or some tiny-python?
Edit2: no ethernet 😭?
Remember today when you reflect on what was stolen from us.
I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.
Begun, the Clone Wars have.
Well, they’ve been going on for a couple of years now, Master Jedi
Pi Picos (which are notably microcontrollers and not computers) have had clones for like $2 on Aliexpress for some time now, and devices like the Orange Pi and similar have existed for years.
Friendship ended with raspberry pi Now Pine 64 is my new best friend
Can you use pine 64 in the same way as a RPi?
Yes(ish) They are not yet as powerful as RPi. But if you have a low power usecase then yes.
Broadly yes, as a “user”.
Anyone used Beagleboards?
So that settles it. I have to get one now before they enshittify the new models.
The 5 is already somewhat enshittified. The Non Standard USB power that makes you buy a propietary PS is one example (which I found out after buying one for my son).
Ew
That is due to power reasons ,but they could have just underclocked it by default.
I don’t buy it. USBC can deliver quite a lot of power
I agree. Pi5 apparently uses 5v@5A max, which is outside the usbc-pd specs. Not sure why they didnt go for usbc-9v in and use onboard components to convert the power to something lower for cpu ( which i assume it already does from 5v )
Maybe those packages are bulky or something.
Wait is it locked to the official charger?
What is the power reason if i may ask?
I dunno maybe cpu? Really it is actually stupid why didn’t they just make it optional.
Tbh, i cant make an opinion without technical details :')
Bu- bu- but… it’s got AI.
The end of a beautiful era - hats off for all the folks who made the pi what it is, the folks who will now be forced to make us sorrowful for what it will become.
I’m glad they came out as what they already were.
It was clear that they did not feel as a non-profit foundation for many years now.
For months it was impossible for me to get any Pis at MSRP and then my employer suddenly bought 30 of them to use for signage around the office. That’s when I knew the non-profit hobbyist/enthusiast org was gone.
I’m not worried about it though. In the meantime a lot of other stellar SBCs have emerged on the market.
Which would you recommend any as the best Pi replacement?
Honestly I still haven’t had a chance to try them out myself so I can’t make a specific recommendation but that market has been exploding recently. I have a sort of nice problem where people keep gifting me their Raspberry Pi’s once they aren’t sure what to do with them so I keep accumulating them without trying.
That being said, the big ones I’ve had my eye on lately are things like the Odroid N2+, the Jetson Nano, the Rock Pi or the Banana Pi. Some of these cater more towards being integrated into projects that need a lot of GPIO, others are focused on just being a low cost low power headless server or thin client.
The SBC market seems healthy enough that by the time I need another SBC I’ll have a lot of options. Biggest loss is just that having one extremely popular hobbyist board made it really easy to find solutions to issues in the community and now there is just a lot more variety out there.
Raspberry Pi Holdings has always been a for-profit company. This isn’t some sort of new news with them going public.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a separate organization that has not gone public and continues to operate as a nonprofit. In fact, the IPO was structured to raise some funds for the foundation’s global impact fund.
I am not saying that the IPO is a good thing, in fact I’m pretty certain it isn’t, but it’s worth knowing that Raspberry Pi is two different organizations with two different missions.
One is a tax shelter for the other got it.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
This hurts.
That explains the Pi 5 pricing. They started the enshittification early.
exactly what i thought. lol.
F
Time comes for us all.
They’ve already gone downhill since 2020 when they couldn’t keep up with the demand and focused on B2B sales. This really isn’t a surprise to me
I thought they started from the idea of creating an affordable device mostly for people that need and can’t afford a proper computer… I guess money gave them amnesia
They did, and they still have the rpi foundation with that goal, as well as the for-profit subsidiary.
It’s a flaw with effective altriusm-- you have a goal of fixing some large scale problem and at some point you realize you need large amounts of capital to expand your impact. But the interim period you are just going to be amassing wealth with this idea of doing good. And even then, you may never reach a point where you feel like you earned enough to solve your problem. I.e sam bankman fried
Now I’m not saying that rpi foundation hasn’t done good in the world. I’m just saying that they did start off with a lofty goal and it is clear that they are wanting to expand and make more money. Maybe this means someday they’ll be able to do even greater things through the rpi foundation… but I’m not optimistic
I have to say I haven’t looked into RPI history, I only remember a video where they were marketing a device that is affordable and very much suitable for learning programming, mostly aimed at kids. Remembering that and seeing them now on the exchange kinda leads to a contradiction in my mind. Especially since a year ago you couldn’t even buy a device if you had the money, let alone if you couldb’t afford one as they intended at the beginnings.
I mean, the market did what the market does.
They released a device with the intent of being a tinker kit for programming and interacting with the physical world. The next technological jump for hobbyists from PIC to Arduino, became an ARM SBC.
Of course, they released a cheap ARM SBC, and industry quickly learned that these are great for rapid prototyping and any case that called for a small low-power Linux system.
I wouldn’t say they lost their way. There’s still a great hobbyists market around it, and tons of good competition. I’d say it’s more like they are a victim of their own success.
