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Why does the RPi still have its own OS? The major linux distros have been doing this for years in their installers/disk images. It seems like just about every w

Why does the RPi still have its own OS? The major linux distros have been doing this for years in their installers/disk images. It seems like just about every week they announce a feature that already works everywhere else. Its sorta like all the "I got a ssh server running on my Pi articles". Not at all noteworthy, except for the fact that the machine is by default quite dysfunctional. So it was yet another reason for the RPi foundation to stop being stupid, and just conform their firmware to SystemReady, and post their fixes upstream. All these custom hoops they keep jumping through to duplicate what every other OS/firmware already supports just speaks to bad mgmt. So, yah they are the most successful Arm sbc vendor, and this all made sense 10 years ago when none of the distro's had working arm ports and there wasn't much in the way of standard arm system architecture. Those days are long gone, and the people clinging to them are just sticking their head in the sand. Particularly since 3rd parties have basically done 3/4 of the work for them and ported a full blown UEFI/ACPI environment to the darn thing. So, they need to put on the big boy pants and stop playing the NIH game.

kelnos 5y ago
This doesn't answer the question of why RPi has its own OS, but I don't want to have to run an installer every time I put an OS on a RPi's SD card. I just want to write a disk image, `touch /boot/ssh` on it (so ssh gets enabled on first boot), and then have a fully-functioning system to ssh into.
- jrockway 5y ago
  You're the installer in your system. You're doing the exact same thing the official installer does, but the installer has buttons for people to click.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  You can now do all of that SSH configuration from within the Raspberry Pi Imager (there's a hidden control panel)
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> Why does the RPi still have its own OS? Because it's not aimed at the general purpose computer market? The OS -- the features, the documentation, the learning focus, the ease-of-use planning, the designed support for school and code clubs -- is part of the product. It's not just a little cheap linux box for nerds; it has a different focus. Also the hardware itself is different, is it not? It has (for example) no battery-backed clock. It has connectors other distros cannot be expected to support (CSI for example). They achieve all of this with their own slice of Debian; it's as close to being standard as is sensible. They also provide a tool -- pi-gen -- to allow you to roll your own distro off the main; it's quite effective. And they have a mainline OS (Ubuntu) if you want that. But if you really want a tiny SBC without their OS platform -- buy one.
- StillBored 5y ago
  "The OS -- the features, the documentation, the learning focus, the ease-of-use planning, the designed support for school and code clubs" It reminds me of the class a family member took recently where they were learning basic shell scripting using c-shell on a bunch of 15 year old Solaris machines. Interesting, but also somewhat harmful because they now have to translate what they have learned to linux/macos/etc should they actually get a job/etc that involves any shell scripting because bash tends to be the default. Similarly with the RPi, the install process needs custom tools, instructions, and images because the normal distro install process (which are overwhelmingly UEFI based) simply don't work. So they are basically teaching everyone how to perform actions that any students that go into IT related fields will need to relearn. https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop#1-overview https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop#1-overvi... And there isn't an argument that they are making it simpler either, since its entirely possible to create ubuntu/etc disk images as well while still burying a proper boot/etc interface in the firmware. So, as I said earlier what they are doing made sense 10 years ago but today looks out of place vs what everyone else is doing. PS: And as far as the hardware, normal distro's don't seem to have problems with missing RTCs (they all enable NTP AFAIK), and none of the interfaces on the board are that weird. Mainline Linux supports GPIO, and MIPI/CSI, etc. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/media/kapi/csi2.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/media/kapi/csi2.html If those don't work on the RPi in mainline, that is where the foundation should be focusing, in order to land their drivers upstream, or provide binary packages for the main distos (or both as some vendors do). They aren't special in this regard, they are only special because instead of doing what everyone else does, they created a custom linux distro.

kelnos 5y ago

This doesn't answer the question of why RPi has its own OS, but I don't want to have to run an installer every time I put an OS on a RPi's SD card. I just want to write a disk image, `touch /boot/ssh` on it (so ssh gets enabled on first boot), and then have a fully-functioning system to ssh into.

jrockway 5y ago
You're the installer in your system. You're doing the exact same thing the official installer does, but the installer has buttons for people to click.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
You can now do all of that SSH configuration from within the Raspberry Pi Imager (there's a hidden control panel)

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

> Why does the RPi still have its own OS? Because it's not aimed at the general purpose computer market? The OS -- the features, the documentation, the learning focus, the ease-of-use planning, the designed support for school and code clubs -- is part of the product. It's not just a little cheap linux box for nerds; it has a different focus. Also the hardware itself is different, is it not? It has (for example) no battery-backed clock. It has connectors other distros cannot be expected to support (CSI for example). They achieve all of this with their own slice of Debian; it's as close to being standard as is sensible. They also provide a tool -- pi-gen -- to allow you to roll your own distro off the main; it's quite effective. And they have a mainline OS (Ubuntu) if you want that. But if you really want a tiny SBC without their OS platform -- buy one.

StillBored 5y ago
"The OS -- the features, the documentation, the learning focus, the ease-of-use planning, the designed support for school and code clubs" It reminds me of the class a family member took recently where they were learning basic shell scripting using c-shell on a bunch of 15 year old Solaris machines. Interesting, but also somewhat harmful because they now have to translate what they have learned to linux/macos/etc should they actually get a job/etc that involves any shell scripting because bash tends to be the default. Similarly with the RPi, the install process needs custom tools, instructions, and images because the normal distro install process (which are overwhelmingly UEFI based) simply don't work. So they are basically teaching everyone how to perform actions that any students that go into IT related fields will need to relearn. https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop#1-overview https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop#1-overvi... And there isn't an argument that they are making it simpler either, since its entirely possible to create ubuntu/etc disk images as well while still burying a proper boot/etc interface in the firmware. So, as I said earlier what they are doing made sense 10 years ago but today looks out of place vs what everyone else is doing. PS: And as far as the hardware, normal distro's don't seem to have problems with missing RTCs (they all enable NTP AFAIK), and none of the interfaces on the board are that weird. Mainline Linux supports GPIO, and MIPI/CSI, etc. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/media/kapi/csi2.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/media/kapi/csi2.html If those don't work on the RPi in mainline, that is where the foundation should be focusing, in order to land their drivers upstream, or provide binary packages for the main distos (or both as some vendors do). They aren't special in this regard, they are only special because instead of doing what everyone else does, they created a custom linux distro.