Raspberry Pi launches its IPO

empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Technology@lemmy.world – 642 points –
raspberrypi.com

It was nice knowing Raspberry Pi while they lasted. Going to suck losing something that has changed the homegrown embedded system hobby forever.

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So, what are the alternatives?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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...

Orange pi is getting better and better. Far from raspberry though.

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

I think Pine64 is pretty cool.

Unfortunately they use Chinese CPUs (made by Rockchip)

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.