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.
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.
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!
looks at your name
Uh-oh. Guys. I think he’s going to steal someones baby instead of making one himself…
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.
Orange or banana pi
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.
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
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.
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.
Change name from RPi to RIP
RaspberryBye.
RiP
RiP
Now, it stands for “Raspberry Intellectual Property”, in addition to the obvious colloquialism.
Witty.
Garbage. They started this in order to provide very poor people the means to program and create things.
It was a fun run.
I hope someone else comes up with a similar product soon.
Similar products exist, but I don’t think any of the others have quite the same level of official and community documentation.
I haven’t looked into it in years but Arduino used to be pretty similar.
Arduino is a microcontroller, Rpi is a SoC that runs an OS… quite different.
Similar situation. Arduino made microcontrollers accessible to the masses like raspberry made low cost computing accessible.
I’m pretty sure there are a lot of similar boards out there
OrangePi comes to mind.
Banana Pis are great
There are, and I think the only real difference has been the community support. The community was behind the original pi and the guides, images and support show that, and it continues to this day.
If this becomes “enshittified” then communities will grow around the alternatives, it’s likely there will be an overall winner (or winners per class) and we’ll move on. The device itself wasn’t ever the whole story.
if I made a k8s cluster with all the options I could have a fruit salad
That’s going to be a fun way to learn pod tolerances and affinities. Although… it’s also a great way to play around with multiarch clusters without accidentally burning a hole in your wallet from AWS/GCP usage.
There are a ton already. RPi stopped being interesting 5 years ago.
I really liked my RP 4.
I got a Pi5 and it’s doin WORK for my partner when they’re working from home all day and watching stuff on the internet!
It’s my last pi for sure.
If you were able to buy one at the beginning of the pandemic it was great. If you weren’t, then the 4 was annoying as fuck because it was impossible to purchase at anything less than 3X MSRP.
Did anyone buy the Pi Zero at $5 or did we all mass hallucinate?
There are already tons of them. And what’s more you don’t even need them anymore because the X86 ones have come way down in price.
Not the same form factor and around twice the price, erying es intel motherboards are a steal at their current price. You do need RAM / Storage / ATX PSU they end up a much more performant’ piece of hardware.
The Q1J2 (20 threads) board I have despite it being an ES chip has given me no issues. Running most of my home services on the board with a coral nvme m.2 + nvme + sata storage. Can even do dual ethernet via the a+e m.2 and add-in more sata storage via m.2 to 6x sata board.
I’ve got a pi somewhere in the mounds of boards at home, but would rather spin up another container / pod / nspawn on my erying board vs go through the motions of setting up a pi.
There are definitely Rpi “card form factor” x86_64 SBCs. UP Board for example is one of those.
I’ve been debating an X86 for all my favourite old school games.
Can i get a little Tristan Pinball up in here!?
I think a bunch of others gained some footing in the market when Raspberry Pi had supply chain issues during/after COVID. When I last shopped for a Pi, I saw a ton of other options.
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 😭?
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.
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.
Friendship ended with raspberry pi Now Pine 64 is my new best friend
Rockchip processors is where it’s at these days. Every pi alternative runs an RK3566 or RK3568
For true open source it’s gotta be RISCV instead of ARM. Bbut it might be too early days for that.
Yeah I mean Pine64 produces RISCV boards
Oh I didn’t know that. I was familiar with Scifive for higher end RiscV stuff, and MilkV for the cheaper and midrange boards.
The RK3588 is pretty nifty, and is the first Mali GPU (610) where ARM themselves have contributed the firmware upstream and have helped with Collabora with Panfrost development
Bleeding edge, still, but kernel 6.10 and Mesa 24.1 have GPU support
HDMI TX and DSI/CSI are still in-progress
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.
People were asking for ML/AI accelerator to replace Coral for a very long time.
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.
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.
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.
You couldn’t buy anything in retail because of scalpers. British shops decided to stop scalpers, so would only sell to existing customers who bought Pis before shortages. So, for example, I had no issues getting 3 more Pis. But if you would make a brand new account you’d see them out of stock permanently. This system worked like a charm! But they should’ve done it earlier.
This hurts.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
