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It's sad that the Raspberry Pi, which was originally conceived as a simple and accessible computer for people to learn new skills, has become so intertwined wit
by mft_ 4y ago
It's sad that the Raspberry Pi, which was originally conceived as a simple and accessible computer for people to learn new skills, has become so intertwined with the user-unfriendliness of Linux. (The comparison with the simplicity of the original BBC Micro is comical.)
You give one example of how the devs (who, of course, fully 'get' Linux and are fully bought in to the experience) have seemingly little insight into how this impacts less able users. (Somehow they think that creating ssh and wpa_supplicant.conf files in the boot folder are less confusing then an extra option in the installer!?)
Other examples (from my very recent experience) include simply trying to install fairly mainstream libraries on a Pi: it took (literally) several days, multiple retries, multiple failed approaches from blogs or stackoverflow, before I could get a working install of python-opencv. (And my final 'success' was just sheer luck, plus trial-and-error, I think).
And there are other examples; every time I start a new project thinking the Pi is the perfect starting-point, the ultimate time taken is 5-10x what it probably should have been.
If the user experience is this bad for someone with otherwise strong IT ability, how on earth do they expect anyone with less expertise to succeed?
- okamiueru 4y agoI don't think Linux is user-unfriendly if you want to learn how computers work. Also, if you want computers for the use cases that a RaspberryPi is intended for, then what other OS choice is there? Heck, just having an OS is an overkill of luxury for most of those projects to begin with. It's unfortunate that you had such a bad experience, but it sounds like you might have had unhelpful expectations.
- testTED 4y agoProbable that easy reinstall and mass deploy are the goal as opposed to "less confusing".
- IshKebab 4y agoSomewhat hilariously they only relented on their refusal to make it easy to set WiFi and ssh up in the imager after somebody forked it and added those features. Anyway I totally agree with you. I wish the Pi had decent support for writing bare metal code in the same way you would write microcontroller projects. 90% of the time all you want it to do is connect to wifi, and run one single program. Running full Linux for that makes it actively worse than a unikernel / FreeRTOS style solution. But I expect the difficulty of making WiFi, USB, cameras, etc. work without Linux is too great.
- watersb 4y agoI upvoted your comment because it challenges the assumption that Linux is The Only Possible Platform. Reflecting on this assumption, I realize that Linux is the most widely supported platform to which the Raspberry Pi Foundation can retain some measure of control. Some. But the Foundation can't fund the development of all the software, and their tweaked Linux is good enough for them, so that's what we've got.