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I’ve worked with rPis, Beaglebones, that NTc Linux board, and nanoPis. As somebody who is not a Linux Guru, the RPi is extremely nice because I can google anyth

by 542458 6y ago

I’ve worked with rPis, Beaglebones, that NTc Linux board, and nanoPis. As somebody who is not a Linux Guru, the RPi is extremely nice because I can google anything I want to do or any error I get + raspberry pi and get a decent jumping off point. The other boards just don’t have the sheer volume of “stupid Linux-ignorant questions” that the rPi does. The other nice thing is the massive community means that software gets tailored to the Pi’s capabilities - things like octoPi have been invaluable to me. Sure, I could assemble the same thing myself, but having somebody else do the heavy lifting is really nice. The final nice thing is that rPis are easy to buy. With other boards I have to pay for shipping from the states or wait for shipping from China. With the rPi, I have one distributor that’s local to me, and a second where shipping is pretty cheap.

megous 6y ago
Seems a bit like self-inflicted wound though. If I look at the /boot dir on my Rpi2/Arch Linux ARM I don't recognize anything there. No u-boot, not boot.scr, nothing standard. If I wanted to configure display, read thermals, cpufreq I had to use some rpi specific tools in /opt, intstead of using standard kernel interfaces. Trying to add a TFT display to RPi involved googling and finding a bunch of outdated/contradictory advice and then still having to figure it out myself with experimentation. Locally bought Rpi2 at the time was also 3x the price of the better specced Orange Pi PC. And if I wanted to use video decoding I had to pay even more. I mean, it's great it works for you. My interest was in learning, and it felt like the things I would learn about Rpi would not help me that much with any other boards, due to quirkiness of Rpi's SoC design, and nonstandard OS interfaces. So I bailed early, and focused on something else. I also found the SoC to be rather closed.

by 542458 6y ago

megous 6y ago

Seems a bit like self-inflicted wound though. If I look at the /boot dir on my Rpi2/Arch Linux ARM I don't recognize anything there. No u-boot, not boot.scr, nothing standard. If I wanted to configure display, read thermals, cpufreq I had to use some rpi specific tools in /opt, intstead of using standard kernel interfaces. Trying to add a TFT display to RPi involved googling and finding a bunch of outdated/contradictory advice and then still having to figure it out myself with experimentation. Locally bought Rpi2 at the time was also 3x the price of the better specced Orange Pi PC. And if I wanted to use video decoding I had to pay even more. I mean, it's great it works for you. My interest was in learning, and it felt like the things I would learn about Rpi would not help me that much with any other boards, due to quirkiness of Rpi's SoC design, and nonstandard OS interfaces. So I bailed early, and focused on something else. I also found the SoC to be rather closed.