I witnessed two of my students trying to drive a neopixel led strip using a Raspberry Pi, and after hours of struggling with Python scripts broken by Raspian up

I witnessed two of my students trying to drive a neopixel led strip using a Raspberry Pi, and after hours of struggling with Python scripts broken by Raspian updates, they just stopped trying. Before that, they had it working with an Arduino board quite easily (as Adafruit have example scripts and a library available). They are total beginners. No operating system mean less power but also less complexity. Sometimes a simpler system is better.