It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.
Might be good, maybe we’ll get an OS competitor then. It’s harder for hardware, but not impossible. An open source, fabless microcontroller built by a nonprofit, perhaps? A lot of universities have labs with the budget to allocate for this as part of a consortium
I like your optimism best to look on the bright side and all— curious what do you mean by fabless? Do they not require as complex facilities because they’re a larger process or something? Or for some other reason?
I was thinking maybe there could be different SoCs or machine learning oriented hardware, and if there are multiple designs then they could be put together somewhere else. Some research labs are specializing in different types of semiconductor devices, which I think might be interesting to explore on a microcontroller
When a company takes on shareholders, whatever goals, mission, or ethos they had is erased. They now exist as a vehicle to make as much money as possible at literally any cost. That’s it. Was nice while it lasted.
Literally my exact first thought, but you were more eloquent.
fuck us
So what do we use now that Raspi has gone to shit?
Orange Pi, Pine64 sbcs, Libre Computer Board, and mini pcs
Who had broad software and driver support?
AI nonsense privacy disrespecting “feature” coming next week
Announcing: Raspberry pi recall
been slowly replacing the PLCs with PIs at my work.
Welp. Fuck Raspberry Pi. The entire stock market is one big scam.
I picked up a radxa zero last year and have been quite enjoying it. the hardware is better than a pi zero but costs less. same with a lot of other SBCs
but raspberry pi has a lot of inertia behind it, a lot of software and hardware support. people will keep using them, just like they keep using Ubuntu, even though it’s a soulless corporate husk of what it one was
As long as I’m not locked into using their OS on their hardware I’ll still be interested. I have a 3,4&5 doing various tasks around my house and enjoy the little boards.
Orange PI comes to mind, getting better over time too.
I had never heard of radxa. Looks awesome!
Raspberry Pi has been over priced for a long time. I’m not saying they’ve been a net positive or negative, but if you think this will make them a bad company then I think they’ve been pretty bad for a bit.
Yeah, expect nothing more than enshitification. That way, if they don’t enshitify like every company does, then we’ll be pleasantly surprised.
The shit winds are coming, Randy
The nice thing about being a pessimist is that you are always either right, or pleasantly surprised.
Not with my luck
That’s the spirit!
Here’s to hoping a solid sbc with gpio pins and solid software support shows up as a competitor to keep them in check?
So, what are the alternatives?
https://lemux.minnix.dev/c/sbcs
There are so many!
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !sbcs@lemux.minnix.dev
I got a ‘LePotato’ a few years back when Pi had stock issues, and it worked quite well as a Pi 4 clone.
Yep, using one to run clipper for my 3d printer with armbian as the OS. It’s been rock solid for me. There obviously some adaptation and discovery when trying to use the io as it’s similar-but-not the same as the raspberry pi io and manipulating it is not the same. But it works, it was available, it was competitively cheap, and it’s been stable
Plus I get to say I’m running my 3d printer on a potato
There’s tons of similar SBC’s out there from Chinese manufacturers, like Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc; usually using mediatek RISC-V or rockchip ARM processors. They’re all poorly supported on the software and documentation side though and take more work to get going, which has always been where Raspberry shined- nobody else has made embedded computing so easily accessible with click and go OS options and continuous kernel maintenance.
Probably the only board closest to software parity is the pine64 boards… but it’s still not quite as good.This is the key point for alternatives. None seem to have the community and support (docs, s/w quality etc) that is remotely close to that of the Raspberry Pi.
They have more features though, like extra Ethernet, PCIe brackets and M2 slots on the board
Those features don’t mean shit if you can’t use a modern OS after a couple of years.
Why could you not run a modern OS after a couple of years? Those SBC manufacturers did not invent an entirely new processor architecture for their computers, you can just generically compile the kernel (plus maybe some slight device tree work).
Beagle bone
you can just generically compile the kernel
Not always. I have numerous old now useless SBCs that never merged their shit with the mainline linux kernel so my only option is to run something 10+ years old.
Guess the community for some of these is about to get much bigger. I’m not in the market for an SBC but this is a big negative against the Pi.
I don’t really recommend any of them anymore, given how much more powerful and versatile x86 processors are and how much their prices have come down very close to SBC levels…
I think Pine64 is pretty cool.
Unfortunately they use Chinese CPUs (made by Rockchip)
Which Pi alternatives don’t?
Libre Computer offers some SBCs with Amlogic CPUs. I think the Le Potato might be the most popular one. I just ordered an Alta AML-A311D-CC. I’m really excited to try out how well it performs!
Okay, and?
“The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.”
Perhaps they’re worried about something similar happening.
Yeah, that’s certainly a thing, but I’d be surprised if China messed with something like Pine64, that’s a pretty low-value target to spend so many resources attacking. The bigger targets would be large corporations like Amazon and Apple, as well as military institutions and contractors.
It’s certainly a valid concern, but it’s also a pretty minor one.
Radxa as well. I have a Rock Pi 4B running as my home server and it has been a great Pi 4 alternative. I also have an Indiedroid Nova with RK3588S which should be better than the Pi 5 bit the GPU drovers aren’t quite there yet. Once GPU drivers are in it should be an incredible board.
Everyone here seems pretty negative on this news. Any particular reason?
Mostly that IPOs put companies into ‘infinite growth mode’ which is obviously impossible, so their product just degrades over time. They can’t just do ‘good enough’ anymore.
Also the reason why every company that is consistently ‘good’ is run privately. If you answer to nobody but yourself you have a lot more room for long term plans
Costco might be an exception here, though may degrade once the leading team dies or exits.
Well, the founder made death threats and I for one believe him.
Wut. When was this?
Just because you are private, doesn’t mean that you answer only to yourself. It depends on how the company is structured and what shares (if any) the leadership holds. In some cases it can be worse because the person who has the shares to force you to do what they want will be able to keep their position without any oversight. Boards in public trades companies are at least public.
Discord is a great example of this. They are privately held and their quality is starting to go down.
The real sad thing is that you and the person you replied to are talking like “publicly traded” and “private” are the only two options, because worker cooperatives are so rare everybody forgets about them.
For me anything “private” just means you can’t buy shares publicly. Worker cooperatives would be included in that (since you need to be a worker to own a “share”)
And those go public anyway. I used to work for the largest employee owned company.
Shout-out to Patagonia.
Going publicly traded fucks every company up with nextquarter-itis.
They did spend the last few years screwing over any customer that wasn’t some giant corporation on a product that was originally created as a low cost tool for educational purposes.
There are a high proportion of far-left types on here. I could see them wanting something to be government-owned or something. But wanting a company to be privately-owned rather than publicly-owned seems odd to me.
And the “enshittification” comments seem odd too.
“Enshittification” isn’t some sort of catch-all term for a company doing worse. Doctorow coined it to refer to a point where a company that had been losing money to grow a customer base ends the rapid-growth phase and starts monetizing that base.
That makes business sense for some companies with low marginal costs and high fixed costs, and especially where there is network effect, like social media companies.
But here, the company is profitable, and not unreasonably so. Like, they don’t have a monetization phase that they need to transition to.
In 2023 alone, Raspberry Pi generated $266 million in revenue and $66 million in gross profit.
Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate.
We’re mostly negative on publicly traded companies because their ceo is legally obligated to squeeze blood from a stone or they quite literally will get sued by the shareholders, plenty of examples out there. The exceptions are usually there because the previous owners wrote contracts, etc to help keep the company as it was prior but even then it only works for so long. Check out Ben and Jerry’s and their whole debacle on the subject.
There are certain fiduciary obligations that CEOs hold to shareholders. But on the flip side, if someone opposes the transition of privately-owned companies to being publicly-owned, then their position is that only the wealthy, those who can outright own a company rather than only part of it, via shares, may own companies. That seems quite like a policy exceptionally loaded towards the wealthy. It would make capital much harder to get, so it would be harder for someone who wants to start a company to do so. Only very wealthy entities – stuff like very wealthy families – would be able to own companies of any significant size. They would have little competition for their capital, and would be able to demand extremely favorable terms for it. Less-wealthy people would be intrinsically disadvantaged by their inability to must outright buy companies. Less capital availability would tend to impact wages negatively.
It seems to me stupendously at odds with the sort of thing that I would expect someone on the left end of the spectrum to want.
Opening up to institutional investment means opening yourself up to ownership by a culture that demands infinite growth. In recent years this has gotten particularly bad; with the rise in interest rates, stocks can no longer deliver moderate growth and still be considered worthwhile investments. Everything is either a rocketship to the moon, or its a sell. Combine that with a string of US court cases that have interpreted tge law in such a way as to foster the belief that its illegal for companies to put anything ahead of shareholder value, and what you get is a top down imperative to squeeze the maximum profit out of everything. When you see Microsoft mulling over ideas like putting ads in your start menu, or EA talking about in-game advertising, this is why. When you see Spotify raising prices multiple times while crowing about how their content production costs are basically non-existent and changing their contracts so that smaller artists literally don’t get paid for their music, this is why.
Because the more commercial they get, the more they stray from their original purpose as a charity to provide low-cost machines for kids to learn about computer science.
First there was the Dynabook, then OLPC, then Raspberry Pi, and now we’ve basically got to start over yet again because enshittification is imminent.
Going public introduces shareholders that prioritizes return on investment as opposed to making technology and knowledge about technology accessible for many.
It doesn’t always end this way but often enough to worry about it…
Every time a company goes public, they become more and more profitable until the only way to continue on that trajectory is to worsen their own product.
Think they’ll still be selling the Pico for $4 or the Zero for $15 after they’re reporting to shareholders?
Big pharma companies jack up the prices of life saving medicine that’s been affordable for decades and don’t lose a bit of sleep. You bet your ass a hobby electronics company will jack up prices as far as they think they can.
Don’t call Raspberry a hobbyist electronics company. Their primary consumer has been business and enterprise customers for years now, industrial/controls companies jumped all over the pi as a super easy drop-in board that can be programmed by any code monkey.
The Pi hardware shortage of the last few years has mostly been because of this demand, with Raspberry openly saying they were prioritizing bulk corporate orders foe their production volume over hobby consumers. Fuck the little guy, Pi is dead.Price is one thing but the push for returns on investments is massive, this means that it’s time to start cutting corners on everything (except maybe marketing! Yea!). Quality, repairability, and innovation all start to crumble.
They think that it’s gonna ruin the company
And they’re right.
Raspberry pi foundation was launched as a charity, and the end goal was to produce a ton of very cheap computers to help children learn about programming. Since then, it has been soo ubiquitous for embedded stuff that for the last couple of years they have basically become unaffordable for the very audience they were intended for. Now they are seeking an ipo because they are used in everything, except as cheap computers for children.
Are they really used in a bunch of stuff? I still onlt see them included in hobby/homelab/maker/education stuff.
In Tech, an IPO means the business is market ready to be sold off in pieces, ie stocks. The people who buy the product don’t care what it does, they use the product maker as a vehicle to more growth and profit. Typically that means the people who now own the business make poor choices about cost cutting, like off shoring support and removing unuseful documentation while removing people with critical tribal knowledge about processes. Each step the new owner takes will be to make the business more profitable, and in the world of business, the only thing they care about are the numbers and not the environment or people that created those numbers.
I’m willing to bet they’ll start adding telemetry features in RPiOS for “quality purposes” a few years from now.
They already have that proprietary and opaque GPU that has full memory access akin to the Intel ME, and its programming is very difficult to audit. There has been something quite fishy about them ever since they left their educational mission behind after the Pi 1 and went for-profit.
Isn’t the GPU documented now?
https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12358545
There are reverse engineered docs as well: https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv
Tech companies as soon as they are publicly traded:
