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.
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.
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?
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?”
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
Arduinos all the way down I guess
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.
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
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
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.
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
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!
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.
There are a ton already. RPi stopped being interesting 5 years ago.
I really liked my RP 4.
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?
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.
I’m pretty sure there are a lot of similar boards out there
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, 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.
OrangePi comes to mind.
Banana Pis are great
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.
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!?
Change name from RPi to RIP
RaspberryBye.
RiP
Now, it stands for “Raspberry Intellectual Property”, in addition to the obvious colloquialism.
RiP
Witty.
Garbage. They started this in order to provide very poor people the means to program and create things.
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.
Now I’m glad I didn’t get plugged in to their ecosystem.
Booooooooooo!!! Boo I say!
I SAY BOO!!!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Introduced in 2014, the Pi gained the familiar 40-pin GPIO header and 512MB of RAM, yet it can hardly be called a ball of fire when compared to more modern hardware from the company.
Pi supremo Eben Upton was delighted with how things have gone so far and said in a statement: "The reaction that we have received is a reflection of the world-class team that we have assembled and the strength of the loyal community with whom we have grown.
“Welcoming new shareholders alongside our existing ones brings with it a great responsibility, and one that we accept willingly, as we continue on our mission to make high-performance, low-cost computing accessible to everyone.”
Some users have expressed mixed feelings about the IPO, noting that the money would be helpful for R&D and new projects, however, the flotation underlines the fact that the company is a business.
As for the future, Upton told The Register earlier this year that while he remains at the helm of the organization, it would continue to do interesting work and try to keep making money.
The Reg hopes this is the case, but think it’s fair to say that pleasing both the corporation’s customers and shareholders might end up being more challenging than obtaining a Raspberry Pi 5 at launch.
The original article contains 498 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Loved the Pi for hosting small services around the house. I’ve just replaced my Pi4 with a N100, 16GB, 512GB SSD mini pc which is so much faster, not to mention cheaper than a Pi5.
Can you compare power consumption to the Pi 4? Just an estimate, double, tripple,…
Not sure what a pi4 uses, but my NUC (16gb ram, 1tb NVME, quad core i3 up to 2.4ghz) running my smart home (HA in a VM) and a few other small services in LXCs uses ~7W on average. Loads more compute power if I need it at half the price. Even if a pi4 draws half the power, that’s only $8 saving per year.
I have a dell wyse 5070 with a j4105 cpu that runs home assistant with frigate and z2m around 3-5W with a bluetooth and zigbee stick attached. If more processing is needed it will boost to 15w for example during docker container updates, but it will also perform much better in these situations than the PI does. It costed me ~85€ from a refurbish shop and even had 1 year warranty. It came with 4gb ram, 128gb ssd, power supply and case ofc. It was a no brainer at the time when just the PI4 alone was like 80€ for 4 gb ram version if you could find it in stock. And that didn’t include case, power supply or sd card.
Indeed this. Plus my minipc has dual ethernet which is handy as I run Proxmox and use the second nic for migration traffic. The mini pc is way better than the Pi for my usage.
Whats events point of going public? Arent they making profit? Or what does it even do for then now?
Their goal shifts from making cool hardware to… money, make money at all costs to appease the shareholder devils.
In general the reasons could be, an opportunity to raise capital meaning they can ramp up production or produce a better product, and/or the current owners want to cash out.
Most of the time is for the owner to cash out. Either now, or in a short time when the ramp up is done, for more money.
More money.
Gotta buy a share just so I can write angry shareholder letters
