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.
Whats events point of going public? Arent they making profit? Or what does it even do for then now?
More money.
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.
This hurts.
I’m guessing this means new pi versions soon.
RPi6 XL Plus - ad free
$4.99/month. It’s essentially just a cup of coffee!
Ew.
Friendship ended with raspberry pi Now Pine 64 is my new best friend
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”.
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 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.
Begun, the Clone Wars have.
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.
Well, they’ve been going on for a couple of years now, Master Jedi
Well, so much for that I guess
I honestly never thought I’d see this day. It’s like announcing Linux just went closed source!
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
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.
That’s the biggest issue. Support.
Most of the success of the RPi is due to rasparian and community support.
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
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.
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
Arduinos all the way down I guess
Orange or banana pi
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.
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!
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’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.
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.
Gotta buy a share just so I can write angry shareholder letters
So on an unrelated note, what’s the best alternative available right now?
Maybe Orange PI.
Honestly… when I was doing my research, for the power consumption and the flexibility of Raspberry Pi, nothing came close to it, at least not at the time (2016). Since then, I’ve never even bothered to look at it’s competition.
Radxa
The 3B was a far superior alternative to the NES Classic I couldn’t get at the time (and taught me what little I know about Linux - I even got a lesson in sudo one time when a command wouldn’t work). o7
F
Time comes for us all.
Now I’m glad I didn’t get plugged in to their ecosystem.
That explains the Pi 5 pricing. They started the enshittification early.
exactly what i thought. lol.
