> I remember the Asus Tinkerboard being the first clone board that I thought could _really_ make a dent... but then Asus basically put it on life support.
Right -- it had potential but it also had problems they were seemingly unwilling to fix.
> Pine64, BananaPi, Orange Pi, Radxa, et all often make some pretty decent hardware, but the fact that it's often as hard today to get my projects working on those boards as it was with all SBCs back in 2012-2014 means I still stick to Raspberry Pi-branded boards for most things.
This is something the Raspberry Pi Foundation people will stress when people snark in comments about specs when they launch a new machine. The total picture matters much more than specific, minor, things.
Even when it comes down to something like pi-gen, which is obscure but enormously useful for tinkering with distribution builders. Or the Raspberry Pi Imager app for desktops.
Eben Upton credits Eric Schmidt with providing the motivation to make computers even cheaper, rather than pursuing better and better Raspberry Pi machines, and in the grand scheme of things it's hard to ignore that Raspberry Pi is better when they do focus on choosing their own constraints with stuff like the 2040 and the Pi Zero 2W.
> This is something the Raspberry Pi Foundation people will stress when people snark in comments about specs when they launch a new machine. The total picture matters much more than specific, minor, things.
Total picture is that I can't still run mainline Linux on Rapsberry Pi 2B without losing a bunch of basic features, while I can run it on almost all my Orange Pis. This makes Raspberry Pi very annoying to use. I wanted to use Rpi 2B as a networked sound card for a room. Nope. No audio support mainline after like 7 years after release.
These are bits of hardware added by hobbyists or small teams. The Raspberry Pi foundation is a company with paid developers supporting a set of devices you could count on one hand (or two if you include every variant separately)
The later ARM64 Raspberry Pi hardware is more standard, and you definitely can get most of the hardware working with a mainline Linux kernel. It looks like sound may be an outlier - but bcm2835_audio is in staging, and I2S is in the tree proper but that does require additional hardware.
I built a moderately successful audio project around it. We've got a few hundred Pi's as audio player appliances for our streaming platform in a hospitality niche in my country.
Yeah, Pi audio card leaves a lot to be desired, but mostly the power level of the output. The signal quality can be worked around somewhat with processing the audio beforehand (standard compression and EQ stuff, so that the signal doesn't need something that the card can't do).
However, there are sound cards you can put on top of Pi, such as https://www.hifiberry.com (which we use), without breaking the budget, and they sound great.
Edit to add: what I love about Pis is how reliable they are. We literally treat them as appliances and they end up in places that are really not optimial from either ventilation, dust or temperature aspect, and they very rarely break. Even SD cards are not as fragile as we've initially feared (we've minimized write cycles but there is some of that).
Sure, but how many Orange Pi-like sbc's bother to advertise mainline kernel compatibility? That matters too if you want ease of support. The Raspberry Pi folks have a long history of working with the kernel dev community; their support is not just hacked together after-the-fact.
Right -- it had potential but it also had problems they were seemingly unwilling to fix.
> Pine64, BananaPi, Orange Pi, Radxa, et all often make some pretty decent hardware, but the fact that it's often as hard today to get my projects working on those boards as it was with all SBCs back in 2012-2014 means I still stick to Raspberry Pi-branded boards for most things.
This is something the Raspberry Pi Foundation people will stress when people snark in comments about specs when they launch a new machine. The total picture matters much more than specific, minor, things.
Even when it comes down to something like pi-gen, which is obscure but enormously useful for tinkering with distribution builders. Or the Raspberry Pi Imager app for desktops.
Eben Upton credits Eric Schmidt with providing the motivation to make computers even cheaper, rather than pursuing better and better Raspberry Pi machines, and in the grand scheme of things it's hard to ignore that Raspberry Pi is better when they do focus on choosing their own constraints with stuff like the 2040 and the Pi Zero 2W.