I think they are referring to those mini PCs -- either new ones from Chinese brands with Intel N100 or "refurbished thin clients" from HP or Dell -- that cost ~$150 but are way more powerful than a raspi in terms of performance and capability.
> Intel N100 or "refurbished thin clients" from HP or Dell -- that cost ~$150 but are way more powerful than a raspi in terms of performance and capability.
Comparing a refurbished PC to an SBC is like comparing apples to oranges.
I think the only people who are disappointed are the ones who were buying the wrong tool for the job.
You get a Linux SBC if you need some combination of small size, low power, convenient access to peripherals (I2C, SPI, and so on) or other unique features.
If you really only need the most powerful computer you can get for your budget and you don't care about the SBC features, you probably shouldn't have been buying Raspberry Pis to begin with.
You might think it's comparing apples to oranges but it's not. Go to forums and see what people do with raspberry pi. Lots of them use it as a Linux machine (Pi hole etc). You could say it's the wrong tool for the job, but that's what a lot of people do, in reality. And they are not wrong -- when raspi was $35 and the whole package is like $60 it made a lot of sense.
And actually many raspberry pis are sitting around doing nothing, because people realize that they aren't interested in the embedded side of it, but the "computer" side of it is too weak to do anything useful. In that sense it is even worse than a mini PC which has enogh power to do some "real" light computer work.
And I didn't make any of this up. These are real things that I see people talk about, all the time.
I think it will be a good thing to get rid of the people using Raspberry Pi as cheap desktops. It was always a compromise before cheap little computers were available. Now that they are, the Pi can go back to being hobby computer.
There are lots of projects that need a small cheap computer that doesn't really need display.
Zillion dollar (pound?) company, apparently, and they rely on some volunteers from SUSE for even basic upstreaming. If you're paying them for OS support, you're throwing out the money.
> Alternative SBCs are much harder to get working and develop on.
No they are not. If anything it was always RPi that was its own quirky thing.
Pretty much all of my SBCs are some form of mainline U-Boot booting mainline Linux (sometimes + a few patches) and a standard Linux userspace. Very uniform.
RPi 2+ I have is some weird bootloader that doesn't fit the wider SBC ecosystem, with its own special configuration, and a lot of RPi only tooling to control their firmware running on the graphics CPU or whatever.
Most boards have some ecosystem to rely on. Either mainline support, some community organized either independently around a particular SoC manufacturer (like linux-sunxi), or around a board manufacturer (Radxa, Pine64, ...), etc.
You're rarely on your own. And even if you are, it's much easier when you have an actual detailed SoC documentation, board schematics, and when things are not some weird ad-hoc thing, but something fairly standard like U-Boot, that you already know and can re-use the knowledge of on any other board, without any vendor lock-in, etc. And when the docs are not some completely ridiculous thing that Rpi was known for years ago.
I'll put it this way, I have a project I'm considering where both a Milk V Duo and a pie zero would probably do fine. But if I follow the raspberry pi example, there's dozens upon dozens of examples for me to look at. If I use the Milk V Duo I'm going to have to figure out that stuff by myself.
The libraries for a pi hat might only exist for the pi for example. I guess I could write my own library though.
Yeah, there's a difference in available public resources between a chip nobody knew anything about just 6 months ago and is just getting upstreamed to Linux in the current release cycle, and BCM2835 from Rpi Zero which has been around for 11 years.
Are you serious? :) At least compare with something like Allwinner H3/A10/... which had similar lifetime.
At the end of the day I know a raspberry pi chip will be supported 6 months from now. I don't know about a new RISC V chip that literally just came out.
