back to article The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

The Raspberry Pi is a moral hazard because it's been far too good to us. For the past 12 years, the Pi series has bombarded the world with extremely affordable, extremely useful computers designed purely to promote education, innovation and the democratization of digital skills. The full spectrum of geekery, from precocious …

  1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    On a slight tan(x)

    Can I give a similar shout out / slap on the back, to the Arduino.

    Given a slightly complicated set of outputs to generate every time some input happened, a board that cost the price of a Happy Meal / pint, let me do it in the time I would once have spent working out which precise version of an 8051 I had for the settings in Kiel compiler

    1. Khaptain Silver badge

      Re: On a slight tan(x)

      I love the Arduinos and the PIs for different reasons.

      PIs can run a full blown OS, whereas the Arduinos are very task dependant controllers.. My favorite usage for the Pi is Home Assistant, and I currently have a home made Arduino dongle on my PC for a personal hobby project, which it does just beautifully/cheaply ( it simulates a Keyboard for various reasons).

      The PIs are expensive for small projects and this is where Arduinos are perfect. With Arduino one must be very careful with keeping coding to a minimum and not importing just any old library as memory usage quickly fills up.

      The Arduinos have limited memory and no user interface ( outside of smaller LED screens) and this is where the PIs are perfect.

      I am happy to use both, they are both extremely useful for interesting home projects. .

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: On a slight tan(x)

        Totally different uses of course, I just wanted to cheer on another example of making simple HW for education, backing it with some well written software and have it become ubiquitous.

        Before this thread naturally devolved into: the Pi should have NVME and 10Gb Ethernet and it doesn't cost $25 anymore and I can buy a used SFF corporate desktop for less on eBay and assorted Windows bashing

        1. Zolko Silver badge
          Boffin

          Re: On a slight tan(x)

          @Yet Another Anonymous coward : yes, thank-you for mentioning Arduino. And actually there IS a top-notch reason to go elsewhere (to the Arduino) : it's a micro-controller and has no OS, and thus is fully hardware realtime. Which, for some hardware (motors), can be a deal-breaker. And at the same time it has a very easy software development environment.

          Also, recently, Arduino has support for the much more powerful STM32 family of microcontrellers that are ARM-32bit based. But still no OS ! (which is good). And the PortentaH7 family seems to standardize on the Raspberry Pi 40-pin GPIO instead of the previous Arduino connectors, meaning that there might be a common interface for extension boards for both families (RPi and Arduino)

          And yes, I know that Raspberry has also made their 32-bit ARM microcontroller board.

      2. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. MyffyW Silver badge

      Maybe it's a Sine

      Both these little boards (Arduino and Raspberry Pi) continue to be useful (and patchable) long after a smart phone bought from a similar period has been ditched as having no value beyond wedging the door open.

      1. blu3b3rry
        Thumb Up

        Re: Maybe it's a Sine

        Not having ever got hands-on with a Pi it was genuinely impressive to find a old 3b+ in a box of stuff being thrown out at work a few weeks ago (presumably whoever chucked it in there didn't know what it was), and find that unlike some computers of a similar age it still had manufacturer support including the latest Pi OS. Props to them for continued support of what some would consider severely outdated hardware!

        Just got to find a use for it now....!

  2. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

    You had to boot up Workbench first then find the Extras disk and then find the BASIC icon which meant many people didn't find it. Also there were different incompatible versions of BASIC depending on which version of the operating system you had - for Workbench 1.0 (the A1000 only) there was MetaComCo's ABasiC, for Workbench 1.1-1.3 there was Microsoft's Amiga Basic, then for Workbench 2.0+ there was ARexx so if you wanted to program in BASIC you had to be motivated enough to buy AMOS or Blitz BASIC.

    There's nothing like turning on the computer and having to use BASIC to load everything as in the 8-bits. Imagine if you turned on the Pi and the first thing you saw was the Python REPL which you had to use to load the GUI or a program, that would be the only true switch-on-and-go Pi, but it would also shut out a whole load of other people.

    Also could we just stop pretending the wedge Pis are named after the Atari 400 or the Amiga A500, that's just marketing. If they insist it's based on a computer instead of the base Pi model * 100 then they're going to have to find a way to make everyone nostalgic about the Amiga A600 which I'm afraid is just impossible.

    1. robinsonb5

      Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

      > make everyone nostalgic about the Amiga A600 which I'm afraid is just impossible.

      Funnily enough, even though the A600 was widely derided back in the day, it's quite desirable nowadays simply because of its small footprint.

      1. ThomH Silver badge

        Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

        It has built-in PCMCIA and IDE too. It's a shame there was never an A1300 or similar, i.e. the 1200 shrunk down to 600 size. The CD32 seems to imply it would have been feasible.

        1. ArtoriosRex

          Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

          Upvoted purely for your use of PCMCIA, because people can't memorize computer industry acronyms.

          1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

            Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

            Not even for Things With An Interesting Name ?

            1. LBJsPNS Bronze badge

              Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

              Not even for Technology Without An Interesting Name.

              1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

                Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

                No those are just scanners - those are boring.

              2. Graham Dawson

                Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

                And never the twain shall meet.

      2. juice

        Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

        Was it derided?

        We had one, and I don't remember any particular commentary about it, though we did get it quite late in the Amiga's life, and people were starting to move onto x86 PCs.

        From my teenage perspective, it played pretty much every game that I borrowed (and/or occasionally *ahem* copied) from my friend who had an A500. And the fact that it was smaller and lighter was a major bonus, since it often had to be picked up and moved to another room when the "family" TV was in demand :)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Not even the A500 was "switch on and go"

          It was meant to be a cheaper Amiga, the A300 to slot in under the A500.

          Except it ended up too expensive so Commodore killed off the (still selling well) A500(+) and positioned the now renamed A600 as a replacement. Except it wasn't as upgradable as the A500 and wasn't much of an upgrade apart from the IDE interface and PCMCIA slot.

          By itself it was a great little system, the only derision is its position in the Amiga hierarchy, if it had been an A300 at half the price of an A500 everyone would have loved it.

  3. Andy 73 Silver badge

    BBC Micro..

    The Pi as a "BBC Micro for today" is one of those weird myths that is perpetuated despite all evidence to the contrary. The Pi was designed first and foremost as low cost accessible hardware, with the software environment left largely to the user and a challenge in most educational environments. In early days, you were on your own until ubiquity encouraged a slew of "get started with the Pi" kits that provided sd cards, cables, keyboards and cases to make sense of that bare board.

    In contrast the BBC was expensive and prioritised quality and a complete environment over convenience. From the start it was possible (and encouraged) to put together a standard configuration that gave you an entirely predictable software and hardware environment on which you could learn. Equally, you might argue that the BBC was designed to make the hardware *more* accessible than the Pi - busses and interfaces proliferated, allowing the base hardware to be hacked, altered and upgraded. In contrast the Pi gives you a (very well) curated set of standard external interfaces around a tightly integrated and largely immutable core.

    None of those differences are bad - they're a natural consequence of the evolution of the computing ecosystem - but they also reflect different goals for the projects. I'd argue the Pi is no more educational than any other SBC (and there are a lot), and the Pi Foundation have not done as much as they might have to address that use case. Indeed, it wasn't until the 400 that they addressed the challenges facing many classrooms of having a simple 'plug and go' option that helped with setup and cable management.

    The PI is incredibly useful, and a huge achievement in establishing a ecosystem that many educators, developers and experimenters have grown to rely on, but it's achieved that through ubiquity rather than some sort of embodied 'educational design'. In that respect, the Arduino project is arguably better at presenting a user with a environment in which they can learn about both hardware and programming with a low cost device.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: BBC Micro..

      ubiquity was the point - for education it's pretty much the only requirement

      The most important design aim was that you could break the OS install and be able to start again easy. In contrast to the complex support required of a desktop Windows setup. Allowing kids to play with and break things, rather than being sandboxed and threatened has been the goal and I think it achieved that.

      1. Andy 73 Silver badge

        Re: BBC Micro..

        That's very much a post-hoc justification - you don't design ubiquity, you just hope your product is more popular than all of the others who are trying to grow in the market.

        And as for the OS install - if your goal is to replace a Windows setup, most schools have found low cost tablets to be much more effective and (relatively) harder to break. Again, the confusing and inconsistent landscape for OS images in the early days of the Pi suggest that an educational environment was not the priority that some people imagine.

        Ubiquity in other markets (especially the hobby and tinkerer market) has made the Pi an easier choice in education - but I note that our kids have gone all the way through primary and secondary education in Cambridge without once touching a Pi. They may be used in Code clubs and other groups where experienced techies are happy to build up an appropriate platform, but many schools go for other options when it comes to computing for pupils.

        1. that one in the corner Silver badge

          Re: BBC Micro..

          > most schools have found low cost tablets to be much more effective and (relatively) harder to break

          The point is not so much that you have a (somewhat) unbreakable system (as with the tablets) but that the pupil *can* break the system - and then know that, if they can't undo the damage themselves, the whole thing can be recovered back to a working state very easily. It is not a traumatic event when you brick a Pi.

          Even as an adult with too many years faffing with computers, I have no fear at all of trashing my Pi and recovering, whereas the idea of recovering/restoring Windows means tedium and teeth gritting whilst trying to get a tablet to work again has a tendency to just give up and get another cheap one delivered!

          Guess which of those three platforms makes it easier to dig in and find out what is going on under the glossy surface? Hence which one you can you learn more from more easily?

          (And, of course, a simple board using Arduino is even easier to trash and recover, as that is basically the entire dev process: aside from the bootloader, you replace the entire contents every time you make a tiny change, do there is absolutely no stress incurred.)

          > but many schools go for other options when it comes to computing for pupils

          Are they teaching how computing works or how to be a User? The latter is something everyone pretty much needs now, which does mean that even those who do get to experience the Pi (and maybe even Arduino) will still be spending more of their school time using Windows or tablets for writing up assignments etc.

          1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

            Re: BBC Micro..

            >whereas the idea of recovering/restoring Windows means tedium and teeth gritting

            Whereas in school, breaking a Windows machine on the school network will involve an expensive support call to G4SCapGeminiOracle Educational Services and the student either being expelled, or shot by the school internal anti-terrorist unit (dependant on pond side)

    2. I am David Jones Silver badge

      Re: BBC Micro..

      I don’t think the BBC was *designed* to make the hardware accessible. It was just a necessity of computing at that time.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: BBC Micro..

        It definitely was. Most 8bit micros had some sort of exposed I/O ports for games cartridges but the BBC went way beyond that in userI/O.ports, ADC inputs and the processor tube.

        Somebody doing the spec was thinking about science/engineering experiments controlled by computer.

        1. I am David Jones Silver badge

          Re: BBC Micro..

          I stand corrected

        2. Ivor
          Boffin

          Re: BBC Micro..

          Exactly and not only that it was designed to be taken apart, easily, which was clear the first time you did, to add something, expand or just nose about. Removing those screws from the rear and then just hinging the case up and away, I still recall the sensation now.

          Not only that with the excessive ports and the tube - you had the rom/expansion port right there, to the left of the keyboard.

      2. MrBanana

        Re: BBC Micro..

        If you compare the BBC Micro with the other 8-bit home systems at that time you'll see a lot more hardware accessibility and expandability designed into the base level machine. Adding another 6502 or Z80 coprocessor wasn't a necessity of computing at that time, but already built into the BBC Micro.

        1. DoctorPaul Bronze badge

          Re: BBC Micro..

          Darn right. In the early 80s, before the IBM PC even existed, the multimedia firm I worked for was doing full screen interactive video using BBC Micros linked to 12" analogue laser disc players from Philips. The analogue bit was fun, you couldn't just tell it to seek to a position on the disc, you had to allow for the overshoot when the head arrived at the specified point and tried to stop.

    3. Tron Silver badge

      Re: BBC Micro..

      The Pi is not really the next gen BBC Micro, as the Beeb was too expensive for most. It was only purchased by middle class aspirational parents for their kids. Most of us had Spectrums. The Pi is very much Spectrum pricing. And yet the BBC went for the micro:bit instead. Really don't understand that.

      With bloated major OSs becoming toxic, we need the Pi to be more than an educational aid. And we need to learn from the past. A more open hardware environment would allow other directions to be taken by third parties, specifically closer to the silicon. I would love to see a BASIC interpreter capable of interacting with web data courtesy of an extended command set (BBC BASIC was ported to the PC). And games produced in assembler. A PC case compatible mobo would have made it easier for people to build out their own Pi PC. And a PC equivalent needs better advertising so that non-geeks can buy them. Yes there is an Amazon store, but the new 'The Spectrum' console has a higher public profile courtesy of a few TV ads during the footy. People still think the Pi is an educational toy, if they have even heard of it.

      And I worry about Linux, which may be/come as toxic and bloated as Windows. I've just bought a 400 (there were no 500s around) and hope to play with it over Christmas. I'm worried that I will just find missed opportunities, and opportunities that will never be taken for want of funding.

      It's sad that tech has created so many millionaires, but instead of funding stuff like this, giving something back to the next generation, so many of them just piss off to their island in the sun and concentrate on their wealth.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: BBC Micro..

        "And yet the BBC went for the micro:bit instead. Really don't understand that."

        It's the rather common tradeoff between low-level and high-level. Some, like me, think programming education works best when you start with something that looks like the environment in which actual programming is done. That means that students get full operating systems, languages that get used in production, and we don't stop them from using libraries. You could describe this as top down, where it's totally fine that their first program that accesses a remote server uses someone else's libraries for HTTPS. They can and will learn later how that library did it. Before they are professional programmers, they will have to build their own subset of a TCP stack, enough that they could build a fuller one from the specs if they wanted to, but I'm not going to make them start there before they can use the network.

        The other option is bottom up, where students are given small building blocks and they should put them together. It should theoretically give them a better understanding of how and why everything works at the cost of limiting the kind of things they can build with only a little skill and experience. The Micro:bit is designed to make it relatively easy to do basic things without giving them an OS stack, and it is closer to a bottom-up tool with some simplifications to try to eliminate the most annoying aspects of that philosophy. It is not my favorite approach, but they have a reason for it.

        "I would love to see a BASIC interpreter capable of interacting with web data courtesy of an extended command set (BBC BASIC was ported to the PC)."

        You could write that without too much difficulty, but you will always be chasing the power of other languages. You can easily make an HTTP_RETRIEVE command that fetches a document, but are you going to make them parse the JSON themselves character by character? Or will we have a JSON_DECODE command? When they want to do something that's not HTTP, are we building in specific commands for different protocols or should they POKE their data through a socket? A lot of languages are more complex semantically because there isn't enough structure to give you the power you need there.

        "And games produced in assembler."

        You can if you want, but I don't know why that is a goal for you and I'm not sure you understand the problems likely to be encountered by those who try it.

        "A PC case compatible mobo would have made it easier for people to build out their own Pi PC. And a PC equivalent needs better advertising so that non-geeks can buy them."

        What it needs is a reason for others to buy them, and especially if you don't like Linux, I'm not sure what that reason is. People can install Linux on machines they already have, but they don't. To convince them to buy a machine that can't run the things they are choosing is harder. To do that when you don't even have Linux, with existing GUI applications that do the same things as the applications they want to use, means that, even if I pay for all your advertising, you have to include in the adverts an explanation of why "non-geeks" would buy it. I don't have that answer, and I'm not seeing it in your proposal.

        1. Andy 73 Silver badge

          Re: BBC Micro..

          From observation of our kids, I feel that to get to the point of "teaching programming" at the level where network stacks are even vaguely relevant, you need to first get them engaged with the basic concept of "I can give a device a sequence of instructions and it will do something I find interesting".

          Both Scratch and Minecraft arguably fill that role far better than either presenting a student with a command line, or giving them a Micro:bit. Those later two options often seem to be far more interesting to grown adults than school age children. Indeed, a lot of discussion about getting kids involved in computers revolves around what grown adults think are fun activities rather than the context of a kid who often has access to a parent's tablet or phone and/or a game console.

          The two biggest problems in an educational setting are providing devices that don't tax the teacher who often doesn't have a great deal of time for lesson planning and researching obscure computing problems, and providing a learning curve that engages at the earliest opportunity and then scales with the understanding of the student. As such, I don't think the Pi necessarily solves those problems in the classroom, and there are still advances to be made that might not look quite like any of the current "educational" hardware or software.

          1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

            Re: BBC Micro..

            The Micro:bit does have the air of "designed by an educationalist" about it. Funny even as a little kid you could tell toys that had been designed to be "educational" rather than designed to be toys or even designed to be things to learn from like lego-technic or science kits.

      2. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: BBC Micro..

        I don't think one single Pi OS could teach everything because there's so much ground to cover. There could be three different Pi OSes aimed at education though - a command line OS, a simple GUI OS, and Linux. Perhaps Linux could be at both the bottom ends (running Scratch and Thonny) and top ends (writing desktop app which downloads data over the Internet).

    4. ThomH Silver badge

      Re: BBC Micro..

      I don't think it's a weird myth since it comes from the Raspberry Pi foundation itself; e.g. see this official Raspberry Pi blog post which includes a video of Eben Upton and Sophie Wilson of Acorn fame and states:

      We love this video featuring BBC Micro co-designer Dr Sophie Wilson CBE and our own Eben Upton, both alumni of the University of Cambridge.

      Eben owned a BBC Micro as a kid, and as an adult he set about designing Raspberry Pi to do what the BBC Micro had done for him: inspire widespread interest in computer programming.

      It is very possible to put too much weight onto it though. Being the same as a BBC Micro in the sense of inspiring a widespread interest in computer programming is very different from many of the other ways that you could be the same as a BBC Micro.

      1. Andy 73 Silver badge

        Re: BBC Micro..

        Agreed, and kinda my point. The design intent was to be an inspirational computing device, but a lot of people misinterpret that quote as meaning the Pi is designed for education and use in schools ala BBC - which it's actually not especially suited to.

        Again, none of this takes away from what Upton and Wilson were espousing, or the quality of the Pi as a very successful product - but it's not really an educational product. The idea that the Pi has "solved" this particular problem though means that any competitors face an uphill battle to gain attention.

      2. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: BBC Micro..

        Even is of somewhat privileged background. His family would like have access to BBC Micro funds in the early 80s. For many others this was a monthly pay packet. The role of the Pi may be somewhat the same, but you need to be looking at ZX81 and Spectrum for the accessibility for many.

        Even those were far more expensive than a zoo.

        The accessibility is the critical thing because as great as BBC Micro was, it’s no use if you can’t get your hands on one.

        1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

          Re: BBC Micro..

          I'm a huge fan of the BBC micro (and still have one permanently set up). Having said that...

          The BBC micro was not a good home computer for the majority of homes in the UK. It was a great machine for education, because it could be used for so many things. But in the home, most people just ran games, with a few people doing spreadsheets and word processing, and even fewer actually writing serious programs on it in a home environment.

          The Beeb had too little memory to be a truly excellent gaming machine. Yes, there are exceptional games out there, obviously Elite, and Sentinel, but if you look at the ports of games written for other systems, the Beeb often looked poor and worked even worse (compared to, say a C64 which had more memory and sprite support, or the 48K Spectrum, which despite it's simple colour system, had plenty of memory to make up for it's deficiencies, while both being significantly cheaper).

          Yes, you could do semi-serious home office type things well beyond what other 8-bit home micros could do (note, in the UK, I do not include the Apple ][ as a home machine, if you thought the Beeb was expensive, you should have seen how much an Apple was in the UK), but adding disks and a printer to a BBC micro pushed it well beyond what a normal household could spend, and well into the cost bracket of serious office systems running CP/M.

          It was an excellent educational system, where you could share printers and disks across a well defined network, add a multitude of different peripherals and other languages, and even link these things together quite easily, but in a home, those advantages didn't justify the cost.

          By the time the Electron and BBC B+ and later models came along to try and rectify the cost and memory issues, you had Atari STs and early Amiga systems looking very good and at similar prices.

          Acorn's fortunes and their impact in the later computing world would have been very different if the Electron had made it to market when it should. Even as it stands Acorn changed the world, they gave us ARM and some WIMP features that are still influential today, but just imagine if they could have made Archimedes at the same price point as the Atari's, something that they may have been able to do if so much money hadn't been lost on the Electron!

          1. Richard 12 Silver badge
            Angel

            Re: BBC Micro..

            As I understand it, the BBC Micro was designed for schools.

            It wasn't intended to be mass-market, because the BBC wasn't trying to compete with Spectrum or Amiga etc. They intended it to be a tough, reliable, and easily maintained computer that schools could afford to own and operate without worrying that the kids would quickly break it.

            Then the market could provide cheaper, less reliable machines for home use once it had been proven that a home market could exist - kids take more care over their own stuff than school equipment, after all.

            All of that backed up by a massive array of broadcast and published educational materials, a lot of which applied to both the BBC A/B/Master and the 8-bit Spectrums et al.

            That last part was really the most important. The machines are necessary, but are a foundation, not the edifice.

            1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

              Re: BBC Micro..

              It wasn't designed specifically for schools. It was actually designed as a home micro, to support the BBC Computer Literacy programme (with it's TV programme), at a time when there really weren't many home micros available.

              It caught on in schools partly because it was available, partly because it was so flexible and partly because it was so easy to program. It also didn't hurt that the UK government subsidised the purchase of the BBC micro in schools.

              Even some of the features that you would have thought were specifically added for schools, such as Econet, were already present in the Proton, which was the system the BBC Micro was developed from (I think it was also available for the previous system, the Atom).

              At the time, home micro's were expensive. It was mainly Clive Sinclair, who lost out for the BBC contract, that drove the price of his systems down below what the BBC micro could be sold at that defined the price of low-cost home micros. But IMHO, the Spectrum as designed could never have been suitable to meet the BBC's requirements.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Made with love

    What's rare about Pi is passion for doing more with less. If Apple bought them, it would be over.

    I wish the whole economy worked like this. The World would be a much better place.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My son has a couple of Raspberry PIs he uses for various things. My ancient ThinkCentre desktops run faster, cost less, do more, include storage, remember the time and don;t require fucking about with SD cards to get something that will boot on them. The Pi seems to be a nice embedded controller for various devices, like EV charging points, but as an educational tool it's a failure and a waste of space.

    1. ICL1900-G3 Silver badge

      Don't blame you for remaining anonymous. There are so many ways to disprove your argument, but I can't be bothered. Let your imagination run free, you might find a use for one - Pi-hole, if nothing else.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I am anonymous because I respect my son's privacy online. Tell me, what do you think a Raspberry Pi does better than a second hand ThinkCentre at half the cost? Apart from being small, of course, and that of course is why Pis are a good choice as embedded controllers. But BeagleBone Blacks had persistent storage ten years ago and yet Pis still can't do that, preferring instead to burn out SD cards with a job they weren't designed for.

        1. m4r35n357 Silver badge

          I have used all versions of Pi since day one (Pi1B). I have _never once_ burned out an SD card!

          I have always used a ram disk, so the SD card only really has to handle updates. It is not rocket science and I think even PiOS does that now.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Depending on what you're doing with it, it is possible to write too much to cards. People do that all the time. I'm not sure how successful your ramdisk approach would be for most people because, until the Pi 4, there wasn't a lot of memory to spare, and even with that, reserving lots of RAM for ephemeral storage will often limit the ability to run software that would otherwise fit well into the Pi's resources. I think their criticism is flawed, and yet your method for avoiding it is not very functional for most users.

            1. m4r35n357 Silver badge

              On the contrary.

              In the "days when there wasn't a lot of memory", running a desktop was pretty pointless, so in fact there was quite a lot of memory to spare for non-gui stuff!

              I used a ramdisk (tmpfs) even on the 500MB Pi1b.

              Read that again, 500 _Megabytes_! Imagine having that much memory when Linux first came out.

        2. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

          Re: anonymous + privacy

          Believe it or not, my name is not really Flock of Crows. Create a pseudonym and you can avoid getting flack for posting as anonymous.

          1. that one in the corner Silver badge

            Re: anonymous + privacy

            On the other hand, sometimes one wishes to Have Words with ones Nomenclator: why "That"? "This" has a better ring to it. But at least it is better than my brother, Another.

        3. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

          Power. A Pi takes 5W or thereabouts. That old Thinkcentre? 30W, minimum. Plus it has a noisy fan.

          If you want basically a personal server, the nice metal box and SATA inferfaces, are really perfect. Plus a PCIe bus to slot exra network cards and wotnot.

          But as a potentially always-on, hardware-twiddling computer, the Pi is way better. For kids, you can just image the SD card, and if/when it gets screwed up, you just restore the image.

          1. xenny

            Agreed the Pi is undeniably better for hardware twiddling, but a Micro form factor ThinkCentre is about 10W with an i5-6500, 32 GB of RAM and SATA SSD and has a lot more choices for OS as well as rather more performance. I'd far rather have one for general use/programming.

        4. doublelayer Silver badge

          "what do you think a Raspberry Pi does better than a second hand ThinkCentre at half the cost?"

          To me, the primary advantages are size/heat/noise, availability, and versatility (of a specific kind). The first one is easily explained. A Pi is easier to fit somewhere because it doesn't need a large footprint or a noisy fan and it doesn't make power usage soar.

          Availability is one of my primary disagreements with you. I don't have lots of secondhand desktops at half the price of a Pi. I assume you're using the normal retail price of one, as opposed to the scalpers who still have their aspirational prices but don't sell many, but at those prices, about £/$/€25-45, the secondhand machines I can find are mostly unimpressive and old boxes which would probably work fine, but would not be very efficient.

          Versatility is one I need to explain a little more. Of course, most of the things you can do with a Pi can also be done with a normal machine. The ease of switching from one environment to another, though, is something I find useful. Sometimes, if I need a temporary machine and would like more hardware access than a VM would provide, I can just take a card out of a Pi, use a fresh one for my temporary purpose, then put my old card back and that machine resumes its previous purpose. I can do the same with another hard drive in a desktop, but the convenience is a little lower.

        5. werdsmith Silver badge

          How many Watts to leave your Thickcentre on 24/7?

        6. timrowledge

          What does a pi do better? Well, it had an ARM cpu. That, right there, is a significant value difference to me. It’s also smaller, quieter, more flexible and oh yes, has an ARM cpu.

        7. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

          Ten years ago the kernel for the Beaglebone Black was being maintained by one guy. I know this because the USB stack was fucked, or the GPIO was fucked depending on which kernel you were running, and this fact came to light when I started investigating when we could possibly expect a kernel where both of these (which I needed) worked.

          You have fallen into the trap of assuming that what matters is the hardware, but hardware without a reliable software stack on top is worse than useless, because it shows initial promise but fails to deliver when taxed. And what the Raspberry Pi team absolutely excel at is supplying a reliable and well managed sofware stack.

          1. werdsmith Silver badge

            Absolutely. And now they are starting to move into cloud services to support their world. Raspberry Pi Connect is really very impressive.

        8. hairydog

          Im not sure where to find a secondhand thinkcentre for less than £20, but assuming you can, I can tell you what a Pi can do that a thinkcentre can't: be frugal on power.

          I have an HP Microserver Gen8 downstairs, switched off because it uses too much power to be left running 24/7. You can run loads of Pis and still use less power (and make less noise).

    2. Andy 73 Silver badge

      You're going to be heavily down voted - the audience on this site will think nothing of finding an appropriate OS image, jumping through a bunch of configuration hoops and putting up with the general hassle of SD cards - but it's fair to say the Pi does not provide an educational environment.

      It provides an utterly generic (and mildly obtuse) Linux environment on which you can do things which may (or may not) be educational, but that is very much down to the person assuming the role of teacher, and not the device itself.

      1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge

        Well, I did upvote him - I bought one of the first generation Pi Model B's - was omewhat prone to corrupting the image, and omission of a RTC was a pain till I added one of those I2C modules.

        Recently bought a secondhand Asus Atom fan-less mini-PC - for £60. Came with 4GB of ram, added a 256GB SSD, added an extra 8GB - and that's taking the place of a RPi 4. The Arduinos will now talk to the Asus via Bluetooth

        1. that one in the corner Silver badge

          > I bought one of the first generation Pi Model B...

          > Recently ... for £60. Came with 4GB of ram,

          > The Arduinos will now talk...

          Leaving aside that that you had a learning experience to add an I2C RTC to a Pi, shall we just think about the span of years between those events? And how much it would have cost, at the time of the first gen Pi, to get a 4GB Intel, let alone an Arduino that could talk over BT to it?

          Oh, and add on the fact that the PC was second hand, so, yes, you are likely to get it cheaper than new.

          I will agree that second hand PCs can make a cost-effective alternative to a Pi 4 or 5; especially if you are not going to connecting peripherals by I2C etc any more. If, that is, you are one of those confident in handling second hand (or even just adding the extra RAM and SSD to any PC): not everyone is (and for them adding an LED to a Pi is a less scary way to start on that journey).

        2. Nugry Horace
          Go

          Given all the BBC micro references in this thread, I read "Asus Atom" as "Acorn Atom".

    3. Eponymous Bastard
      Coat

      Missing the point

      I don't have children, but if I did, their surname would not be Bastard.

      1. Ken Shabby Bronze badge
        Devil

        Re: Missing the point

        If twins, Complete and Utter

        1. LBJsPNS Bronze badge

          Re: Missing the point

          Leave us not forget Vyvyan U.

        2. CountCadaver Silver badge

          Re: Missing the point

          Alongside Total, stupid and useless

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      How much was that thinkcentre new?

      How much were the Pi boards?

      How happy would you have been to have one fried by a student who'd misconnected 12v to an IO header (which the thinkcentre doesn't have)

  6. pinkmouse

    "Time to start making the hard stuff as easy as Pi"

    And you can start with the incoherent mess that is Linux

    1. m4r35n357 Silver badge

      Or that sack of shit Windoze.

    2. The Central Scrutinizer Silver badge

      You mean the OS that serves up most of the world's websites? The one that doesn't spy on you? The one that just gets out of your way so you can get stuff done? The one that doesn't lock up on you or crash multiple times a day?

      Or another Linux that I've never heard of?

      1. pinkmouse

        Don't be silly, you know exactly what I mean. Linux is made by geeks, for geeks, who like being geeks. And there's now't wrong with that.

        But for your average class of 12 year olds, (or, indeed, most adults), it's convoluted, nonsensical and obtuse. Sure, one or two out of a class of 30 odd may get it, but most won't and will be put off it for life, ending up with the windoze and mac users you love to insult. Linux is its own worst enemy, and by its very nature, always will be.

        1. The Central Scrutinizer Silver badge

          Don't put words in my mouth. I'm not insulting Windows or Mac users, but I'll happily insult Windows itself in particular. You are the one being silly. Do you actually know anything about Linux?

          You can get a Linux install such as Mint up and running far quicker than Windows. It's as geeky or as simple as you want it to be.

          It's time you got up to speed with how easy it is to use, if you still think it's only for geeks.

          1. pinkmouse

            So the six or so hours I spent trying, (and failing), to get Reaper DAW up and running on a Pi4 last month doesn't count? I ended putting it on a 14 year old WinXP laptop, and it took, maybe, 5 minutes, including the download, (on anther machine, I'm not stupid enough to connect XP to the internet).

            1. The Central Scrutinizer Silver badge
              1. pinkmouse

                And that's my point, Linux is anything but perfect, especially in an educational enviroment where you want to get kids interested in programming and computers.

              2. pinkmouse

                Ah, so you deleted your post...

                Luckily I still had that open on another tab...

                "Not everything is perfect, you know that, right?"

              3. Lon24

                Dunno - have you tried getting KDE Dolphin running under WinXP?

                Bottom line is for web/email on a the easiest/fastest setup is ChromeOS followed by windows orientated Linux distros followed at some distance by Windows 11. I know, I'm a Linux geek who needs more than Windows could ever offer which is (ironically) why some people come to me to set their Win11 computers up!

                But if you buy a PC with Windows then it still easiest to go with Windows then discover and have confidence with the alternatives and overcome the common perceptions described here.

                1. pinkmouse

                  "have you tried getting KDE Dolphin running under WinXP?"

                  Nope, I'll quite happily admit to that!. But then again, that's a pretty advanced file manager, and i'd guess, 95% of Windoze users will never have the need for anything other than the built in tools.

                  "Bottom line is for web/email on a the easiest/fastest setup is ChromeOS ..."

                  Indeed, and although web is still relevant, how long before email has gone the way of dial up BBS's? A lot of the young people I know only use the IM platforms and don't even have email acounts. Now work is another thing, but that's why companies have IT departments, and with proper support, I see no reason why one of the Linux builds should not be perfectly usable for most office tasks.

                  But we're getting way off topic here, so I'll shut up now! :-D

                  1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

                    "Nope, I'll quite happily admit to that!. But then again, that's a pretty advanced file manager, and i'd guess, 95% of Windoze users will never have the need for anything other than the built in tools."

                    For most average users, of *any* OS, they make do with the default tools because they often don't know that alternatives exist. MS seem to be making their file manage even more dumbed down than ever and nudging users to the Android way of not using it at all. The default Music, Video, Documents, Downloads etc folders where most apps will, by default save and or load from encourage this. Many of the users I have to deal with seem to have little concept of how the file system and a file manager works. Hell, most of them have 1000's of emails in their inbox and don't seem to have learned how to make and use email folders either. So yeah, most users will never try to install a different file manager mostly because they don't know they exists.

            2. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

              After a whole minute looking at Reaper DAW...

              First up, there is a huge cultural divide between Windows and Linux when it comes to installing software. My Windows knowledge is over two decades out of date so please be a little understanding when I show my age.

              From what I remember of Windows, if you want to do something more constructive than play Minesweeper you would need to install some third party software. So, web search, pick something, follow the instructions and there would be a fair chance of it working without having to jump through obscure hoops. Back then there was also some chance that there would be hoops to jump through.

              For Linux I would normally expect to get software that does what I want from the distribution's own repository. A quick search for "Debian digital audio software" gave me a choice of six (there are probably more that I would have found by clicking on the second link in the search results). I would expect to be able to install any of those six by typing in three words. I would also expect that the first two I try either do not do what I want or do but I fail to find out how before losing patience and moving on to the next.

              If you apply Windows logic to Linux then you might well quickly get to Reaper DAW's download page. Because my background is Linux I would see your position as at the top of a high diving board over some very deep water. Your experience from this point on is beyond the control of the volunteers who created your Linux distribution. It will depend entirely on how much effort the creators of Reaper DAW put into supporting your distribution. In the vast majority of cases the revenue from Windows and Mac users massively outweighs the revenue from Linux in total - let alone any particular distribution.

              I am impressed by Reaper for even trying to support Linux. I expected only x86_64 but they do have aarch64, i686 and armv7l builds. Because I am old I do not expect Windows users to understand the concept of needing to pick the build corresponding to their CPU architecture (or working around that with QEMU). The download page expects a high level of computer literacy to avoid that first barrier (there is a prominent link to the manual that I did not follow). The brief glimpse I took at how to proceed from there showed that Reaper tried to cover the differences between distributions with a shell script. A natural solution for someone with a Linux background but a barrier to a Windows user taking a peek over the fence.

              Perhaps you have good reasons for selecting Reaper. You might not want to throw away years of experience with it and spend time learning something new. Perhaps Reaper has features you need that you know are not in the alternatives. If not, the solution is to use Linux the way Linux users do and try the software in your distribution's repository first. If that does not work for you then the next step is to expect difficulty. If installing Reaper on Linux was so easy that Linux experts could do it quickly, Reaper would be in the repository.

              1. pinkmouse

                Re: After a whole minute looking at Reaper DAW...

                Thanks for your thoughtful comments. But let's clear up a few things. I am old too, I started "Poke"-ing bare metal Z80 machinecode into memory on my ZX81 many years ago. Since then, I have run used many computers and OS's most recently Macs and Hackintoshes, though I do have a very cut down install of Win10 on my gaming machine in the front room. The last version of Office I installed was 2000.

                I built a NAS from scratch, running UnRaid, with a few containers for music servers and suchlike. My experience with RPi has been mostly using them to drive 3D printers, or host 80's synth emulators, so basically configuring downloaded card images. So I likely have much more "hands on" computer experience than most, certainly more problem solving skills.

                So Reaper. Firstly, I just duplicated your search, (on DuckDuck Go) and on the first link, (It"sFoss), Reaper is suggested as the fourth option.Secondly, though your arguments and points are well thought out, logical, and to the point, as a user who just wants to get something done it's all complete bollocks. Why should I care what distro I'm runnning? Why are there even differing distros at all? CPU type? I don't care, it's not my problem. Reaper is paid software. If they offer an installer for a system it should work. Why should I run a shell script? Why doesn't the installer do it for me?

                Now, that may all have been a bit tongue in cheek, but I hope you get the point. I forget who updated Arthur C Clarke's phrase, but I think it makes a good point. "Any technology distingushable from magic is insufficiently advanced ". That's what modern users want, not trying for the 5th time to get the correct syntax for a Sudo command, that may not even be the solution to the problem you're having...

                1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

                  Re: After a whole minute looking at Reaper DAW...

                  Yes Reaper was recommended 4th. If I had an audio task to do I would have gone through the recommendations in order. Reaper would have been pushed to the back of the queue the moment I did not find it in Debian's repository. I just want to get things done too. The difference is we have very different expectations about the effort required to install software that is not in a distro's repository.

                  "Why should I care what distro I'm runnning?" You shouldn't have to.

                  "Why are there even differing distros at all?" A sentiment I mostly agree with: too much cost for not enough benefit. Neither of us is world dictator so we cannot prevent the world and his dog creating yet another distro.

                  You should not have to deal with CPU type, but that would require extra effort from Reaper who have to prioritize what they spend time fixing. That makes it your problem.

                  Yes Reaper's installer should work. Your expectations are very different from mine.

                  The shell script is the installer. It exists because too many people made distros with (often) pointless differences that the installer has to work around. The plus side of a shell script is programmers can go through it and find out why it fails and possibly fix it.

                  The problem you are having is that Reaper do not have the resources to fix their installer for every distribution. Fiddling with sudo commands is never going to fix that. Trying the next piece of software down the list is a much better bet. Sometimes (but not always) free software is a better bet than commercial. People are more likely to fix free software so you can use it without issues. As I say, Linux and Windows users have extremely different cultures and their expectations are going to get them into difficulty when they apply their culture to the other side of the fence.

                  1. pinkmouse

                    Re: After a whole minute looking at Reaper DAW...

                    I don't disagree with anything you said there at all, it is different outlooks.

                    But that's why Linux can never be relied on in education, (or a work enviroment witthout dedicated tech support). If I went to my teacher saying I couldn't do my homework 'cos my distro didn't support the software I needed and I spent 6 hours trying to sort it out before my Mum sent me to bed, so I haven't done my English or Maths either, how would that go down? Even if it's the truth? :-)

                    1. seldom

                      Re: After a whole minute looking at Reaper DAW...

                      You would have got the same comment on your end of term report that I did;

                      If Seldom had spent as much time, creativity and effort into doing his homework as he did into crafting excuses why he couldn't hand it in, his grade would have been an A instead of the C he recieved.

              2. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: After a whole minute looking at Reaper DAW...

                Give you an example - Calibre, which is a common ebook library management software (my wife would have to live to 500 to read every ebook she has), on windows search for calibre, download, double click and follow the gui prompts and done.

                Linux - software creator advises NOT to use package managers as they are out of date and instead use an installer script, which then screams about something being missing. Cue having to search on how to actually install what it wants.

                I find it interesting that the same folks who laud Linux package managers decry windows store, which at its core is pretty much the same concept.....

          2. CountCadaver Silver badge

            I love Linux, however Linux mint has recently developed an issue with it's screensaver causing it to crash and various forums when people have raised this have gotten the usual responses - you are using it wrong, doesn't happen here, reams of cli commands with no explanation of what they do or worse just "your stupid" type responses

        2. ecofeco Silver badge
          Facepalm

          Tell us you haven't used Linux in ten years without telling us.

      2. that one in the corner Silver badge

        > You mean the OS that serves up most of the world's websites?...

        Just because Linux is the better alternative for that task, and many others, does not preclude it from being a tangled mess[1]. Certainly from the p.o.v. of someone trying to learn about what an OS is, how it works etc.

        Much as I use Linux and run many more instances of it than I do FreeBSD (and have more of this than the inevitable Windows), I am **VERY** glad that were far simpler and smaller OSes (including Unix) on far simpler and smaller computers available when I first starting learning about computing.

        Much easier to start on something smaller, yet fully functional, then work one's way up and add complexity - and tangled mess, the further one ventures from the kernel - in later lessons.

        [1] "The Best Available" is also "The Least Worst".

      3. MSArm

        Windows is used by most people - google that stat, it's not too hard to find.

        Until Linux can run people's software that they are used to, Linux is never going to break the desktop market. Partially running a few programs won't make people switch.

        For example, of the 80+ games I have paid for in Steam, less than 12 run on Linux. Want to run Scrivener on Linux - you can't. Please don't lecture on how Linux can do it all, it can't.

        *sigh*

        1. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
          Linux

          There is a reason for "windows is used by most people", that reason is called "Office"

          Thats it... once you've been locked into the office/windows monoculture, thats it. thats all you'll use, again because m$ make sure that stuff created in office can only be opened in office.

          Everything else that most people do on a PC surfing, shopping, e.mail, making naughty vids for onlyfans can be done on a linux powered PC.

          However... people think windows because they use office at work. therefore windows at home.

          And with 90%+ of the PC desktop market , its extremely hard for anyone else to break into that market no matter how good the rival operating system is or how badly m$ screw up this week.

          As for installation of linux... insert USB stick , press power on button... wait for the live USB desktop to appear and press install to HDD. followed by pick a user name and password and you dont even need to setup an online account to do it

          1. pinkmouse

            Hmm, you haven't read through all the thread, have you? ;-)

            And though I sort of agree with you, it all falls apart as soon as they try to connect that old printer, or Uncle John's digital camera to get those pics of that family party when Auntie Doris fell in the canal, let alone the web cam borrowed from work so you could whatsapp your sister in Australia.

            1. werdsmith Silver badge

              You are correct pinkmouse, but only in the real world. On Register forums you can’t win that argument.

              1. pinkmouse

                "On Register forums you can’t win that argument."

                I know, but I've been coming here longer than a lot of the contributors have had their CompSci degrees, so I feel I have a suitably entrenched position. ;-D

            2. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
              Unhappy

              I will reply here

              Its was actually easier to stick my old HP all in one prunter (2007 vintage) on the linux mint box than it was to get windows 10 to talk to it.

              Even after I put it on the network here , windows still has trouble seeing and using it while the mint box goes 'meh its a printer' or 'its a scanner' depending which button in gimp I press

              Your camera issue also falls apart, although to be fair both boxes see all my cameras just as well. cant comment on the webcam as I dont have one, but mint worked fine with my dad's laptop cam.

              As for the office points raised, I have files created with office 1995'ish that the latest version of office could not open correctly... so they are imported via Libre office , then exported so orafice can see them.

              But the big point is that people see windows/office as the computer........ m$ has a 90% + share of the market, how many tales of "that blue IE icon is the internet" do we have? or "I use the office icon to do all my work" ? they do not care if a better OS is available or even an alternative. they use what they are given and what they are given is windows/office as 'everyone else uses it'

            3. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

              "connect that old printer, or Uncle John's digital camera"

              I'm sorry. I take exception to that.

              You are much, much more likely to find that an old piece of hardware will work with Linux than Windows 11. There is so much device support that Microsoft have deprecated, and software facilities that Microsoft have removed from modern Windows that mean that even if you can find the specific piece of driver software that came with your printer or camera, the chances of it running is minimal, and without it Windows may not even recognise the device!

              Most multimedia devices have support in the repo's for most major Linux distro's. If a media device was in common use, the chances that there is support in the distro's is almost unity. Device support is almost never removed from Linux repositories unless something critical has been removed from the kernel, and this happens very rarely, as Linus et. al. value backward compatibility very highly.

              Yes, yes, there are devices that have their own interfaces that require specific software, especially the very oldest, and some may not have been ever supported in Linux, but I think you would equally struggle with these devices with modern Windows, and Microsoft have stated that going forward, printer manufacturers will have to provide drivers for their printers for inclusion in the Windows software centre. How many printer manufacturers will provide these for old devices that they no longer sell or support?

              In fact, I recently did struggle with a new printer and Ubuntu. It was so new, that the Epson European support site for it did not have the drivers yet (for either Windows or Linux, but strangely they had for IOS), but within a couple of weeks, the Linux PPD files appeared that allowed it to be configured in CUPS, and IPPS worked anyway without the driver if you set it up correctly, exactly as it should. The CUPS version that now includes the PPD file (it would work without the PPD file, but you didn't get all the features) is now in the Ubuntu repository

              Oh, and did Microsoft not make an announcement about Windows Hybrid Media recently?

            4. ecofeco Silver badge

              Yeah, no.

          2. doublelayer Silver badge

            "once you've been locked into the office/windows monoculture, thats it. thats all you'll use, again because m$ make sure that stuff created in office can only be opened in office."

            How little credit you give LibreOffice these days. I thought it was mostly Microsoft fans who thought it couldn't open anything. In your zeal to condemn Microsoft, you are not giving LibreOffice and other tools the credit they deserve for opening most documents just fine, but you're also just being wrong because the Microsoft Office formats are relatively open and static such that they are relatively backward and forward-compatible and can be opened by lots of software.

            1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

              It's not LibreOffice being given little credit, it's about Windows being the de facto standard and it's associated MS Office evil twin! Ask most user about LibreOffice and they will have either never heard of it or assume it's incompatible and just as expensive as MS Office. At least I'm pretty sure that was the point he was making about the Windows/Office ecosystem.

              1. doublelayer Silver badge

                They did say that, but that was not the only thing they said. They made a specific claim that Office files could not be opened in things other than Office and then claimed that this was the case because Microsoft deliberately designed it that way. The former is false, as demonstrated by the fact that LibreOffice, whether people choose to use it or not, can in fact open, view, edit, and save documents in those formats, as can Apple iWork, Google Docs, OpenOffice in whatever state it's in now, and several other programs. The latter is also false, because Microsoft could, subject to legal risks, break those formats and prevent software other than theirs from reading them.

        2. Richard 12 Silver badge
          Headmaster

          Actually, that would be Android

          Which is a Linux distro.

          Not that it matters, because it's hidden that implementation detail away very thoroughly.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I get what you mean about Linux but that's kinda not the point of the Pi, you're thinking of it as a daily drive computer instead of a tinkerer's machine for learning to code for interaction with the real world via the GPIOs,

      Which the PI does really well *despite* Linux (it could actually have been any OS that you could expose the interfaces on but Linux being OSS is ideally suited to add that functionality at zero licence cost to add to the purchase price)

  7. rgjnk Bronze badge
    Boffin

    Cheap

    Guess it depends on what and how you're counting, but compared to where they started I don't currently really factor a reasonably capable Pi + all the other bits I require to get it working as 'cheap'.

    Repeatable utility embeddable computing maybe, but the days of 'cheap' really seem to have gone.

    PS. I don't really factor in the Pico when thinking 'Pi' as it's a completely different type of product.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Cheap

      The wedge Pi x00s + monitor are cheaper and more useful than Chromebooks.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Cheap

        More useful, yes. Someone may be along to argue the utility of the Chromebook's Linux mode, but I'm not going to be that person. I'd much rather have a Pi 500 than a Chromebook.

        Cheaper, no. Chromebooks can be really cheap. Some can be less expensive than the suggested $90 US retail price of the 500, though I'm guessing those are not very fun to use. Even when they're not, it ends up being similar, because you still need other things for a 500 to work. Add in the cost of a high-current power supply, sufficiently large and fast SD card, and display, and you've possibly doubled your costs. You may have some of those things already, but since the Chromebook includes that and a battery together, cost comparisons that compare like with like are going to include them. Some people who are considering a cheap Chromebook will not have an HDMI monitor just sitting around because they didn't have a desktop before, and while they're more likely to have an HDMI television, that's not their desired workspace setup.

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: Cheap

          There will be a Pi 500 desktop kit available soon and a Pi monitor and you don't really need anything else. And if someone already has a bedroom TV they may not even need the Pi monitor.

          Any Chromebook which manages to work out at same price as the Pi desktop kit + Pi monitor will be a horrible experience - if not now then after a few years of updates it certainly will. Any Chromebook which manages to work out at the same price as the Pi desktop kit will be unusable out of the box.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Cheap

            Since the Raspberry Pi components are priced in dollars, I'm using those.

            Pi 500: $90

            Power supply and peripherals: included with desktop kit, increases above price to $120

            Pi monitor: $100

            Raspberry Pi 64 GB SD card: $12

            Total: $232

            Unlike the $90 Chromebooks, which exist but I wouldn't want to use them, $232 will add many options to the list, options with better specs. They also come with a useful feature: portability. People like that. If we tried to make the Pi portable with a battery, we would have to spend more to get a battery and we'd still end up with a much less elegant package.

            The Pi is cheaper only if you have some of those things already.

            1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

              Re: Cheap

              And anyway, it's an apples and oranges type of comparison unless anyone can find a desktop Chromebook that's *not* in a laptop form factor :-)

            2. Dan 55 Silver badge

              Re: Cheap

              The desktop kit comes with a 32GB SD card. So we looking at £120 + £93.60 = £213.60.

              So a quick check of Argos shows there are Intel Celeron/N100 Chromebooks starting at £10 above the Pi desktop's kit price, perhaps Intel are giving CPUs away to try and remain relevant, and ARM Chromebooks start at £229 except one at £199. The cheapest models has 4GB RAM but the Pi 500 has 8GB RAM.

              The maths works out on the right side of the pond at least.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cheap

      That's why I use secondhand ThinkCentres instead. More memory, actual storage, faster processor, lots of ports, half the cost of a Pi.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Cheap

        That's why I don't understand the global car industry selling $Bn worth of cars when I got my Nan's old Fiesta for free.

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: Cheap

          Driving schools up and down the country should hire your Nan's old Fiesta to teach driving lessons, it can't fail.

          1. werdsmith Silver badge

            Re: Cheap

            Yeah thinkcentres ffs.

            I needed some oranges to squeeze for orange juice, but potatoes are cheaper and they are also nutritious so I’m going to squeeze them instead.

      2. IGotOut Silver badge

        Re: Cheap

        I've a 512 GB SSD hooked up.to my P3 that I got for £10. Hooked up to a TV when I need to actually look at it's display.

        So less than £40 spent, given it's a brand new SSD Takes up less room, uses less power and just works.

        So please bang on about your thinkpad. But then again, when I listen to someone that has to use A/C "to protect their son's" identity". I know it's the sort of person that phones IT to clear a paper jam.

      3. gotes

        Re: Cheap

        This bicycle's no good, what if I want to haul 3 tons of gravel with it?

  8. AMBxx Silver badge
    Windows

    Everything has become so complicated

    I started with a ZX Spectrum. There was a very steep initial learning curve but you very quickly became proficient in standard tasks.

    That was a start for writing your own programs no matter how poor.

    Then move to a Beeb an took to 6502 assembler. It's beauty was the simplicity of the code.

    Then DOS and QBasic.

    Windows 3, then 95 with VB 4, 5, 6. I learnt VB from the videos that came in the box.

    Compare that to now. Windows 11 or latest favourite variant of Linux. Throw some general purpose programming language on top (C#, VB.Net, Java etc). All of a sudden you have this massive amount of knowledge needed just to get started - OO dev FFS. Then you have to work out how to make the Linux firewall open ports.

    I'm glad I'm at this end of my career. It's been a fairly steady increase in knowledge over the years.

    1. Ian Johnston Silver badge

      Re: Everything has become so complicated

      As someone said, "Car manuals in the 1960s told you how to adjust valve clearances, now they tell you not to drink the battery fluid."

      1. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: Everything has become so complicated

        In the 1960s you could unscrew the tops of batteries to pour fluid in. Now batteries are sealed and you can’t even tell there is liquid inside.

        Valve clearances rarely need touching over the

        life of the car.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Everything has become so complicated

          And drink them ....

    2. EricM Silver badge

      Re: Everything has become so complicated

      C64, Basic, 6502 Assembler, DOS, VMS, Unix here - you seem to be about my age :)

      Agree with you on rising compexity over the years.

      As it is hard to grasp all existing complexity today during education (instead of having it seen grow over 30, 40 years), younger folk often work more with the mindset "I not not need to understand all of this", so they are ready to accept unknowns - physical and logical black boxes in all forms and sizes - much more easily, as for example me.

      As an IT Architect I still strive for a full stack understanding of an environment and all the consequences of any given technology choice - which makes me pretty reluctant in selecting new, complex technologies and fight for KISS solutions instead - which is sometimes interpreted as me becoming more conservative.

      My younger colleagues on the other hand often feel ready for takeoff adding complex new products to a given systems landscape after watching 2 Youtube videos explaining the provided interfaces.

      However, lack of full-stack understanding often leads to problems down the line during integration.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Everything has become so complicated

        "However, lack of full-stack understanding often leads to problems down the line during integration."

        One of our clients is transitioning to a new ERP. They just delayed the transition for 3 months. I think that will make it 2 years since they announced it. They are not THAT big of an organisation, but every time they announce a new "go live" date, yet another "gotcha" raises its ugly head. I think there's been 3 "go live" dates set so far, this next one being number 4.

        Hopefully, it's because there is someone like you on the implementation team.

        Not my problem, it's not our system and not my employer, but it's fun to watch from the outside :-)

    3. Khaptain Silver badge

      Re: Everything has become so complicated

      I agree with everything you said but the difference today is that there are a huge quantity of librairies that greatly reduce the complexity of many tasks..

      Programming has never been an easy subject, take Assembler as an example , it's no more difficult today than it was when I started , lol ( it might be the exception though :-))

      1. MrBanana

        Re: Everything has become so complicated

        No, the quantity of libraries is one of the big problems. If I pick a library function, rather than write it myself, I suddenly end up pulling in 5 other dependent libraries that bloat the code I need to worry about - increasing the complexity of maintenance. And the second big problem is the quality of all those libraries.

      2. Munchausen's proxy
        Pint

        Re: Everything has become so complicated

        > a huge quantity of librairies that greatly reduce the complexity of many tasks..

        But greatly increase the complexity of maintaining the computing system.

    4. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Everything has become so complicated

      "Compare that to now."

      "Throw some general purpose programming language on top (C#, VB.Net, Java etc). All of a sudden you have this massive amount of knowledge needed just to get started"

      No, you don't. You have a lot of things to learn to understand others' code, but simple code often remains simple, in fact, often simpler than older languages. Basic and variants made simple programs simple at the cost of making complex programs maintenance nightmares. Not that people can't still use Basic, but they tend to use the languages that others use in production.

      "Then you have to work out how to make the Linux firewall open ports."

      As compared to before, where you didn't have to worry about that, free of the responsibility, because you couldn't write a program that would interface over a network because your computer didn't have any networking. The complexity involved, which mostly is going to involve one line, is directly related to having features which weren't available before. Eventually, the student will learn what happens when they type "ufw allow 8080", but there isn't much complexity when they learn how to perform the action.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Everything has become so complicated

        Microsoft took BASIC (again, this time in the late 2000s-early 2010s) and managed to turn Print "Hello World" into TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World"). The documentation so someone can try and understand Small BASIC is this. Resources for this language were given the following easy-to-remember website address: https://smallbasic-publicwebsite.azurewebsites.net/. It was abandoned in 2015. As an introduction to how the modern-day tech world works, it couldn't be bettered. As a method of teaching a beginner's programming language to a beginner, it sucks.

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Everything has become so complicated

          Oh no, they turned one line into one line. There's a good reason to have syntax that works like that: it lets you handle lots of objects instead of having only commands. Having one print command is great as long as you only have one place where printed text can go. If you have a GUI, then being able to say things like StatusBar.WriteLine or Button.Label.WriteLine or AutofillOptionBox.WriteLine are useful. Not just useful, but effectively required, so teaching students about functions has a reason to take precedence.

          If the hello world program required setting up the text window first, you might have a valid complaint. In the absence of that, I'm reminded of the people who thought it was terrible when Python changed "print string" to "print(string)". Sure, you might prefer one syntax over another, but is that really the most important part of language design to you? The syntax of Basic-type languages was built for constraints different from those we work with today, which is why new syntax, for example the common C-derived syntax, is more common.

          1. Dan 55 Silver badge

            Re: Everything has become so complicated

            You don't have to set up a window object when you run a program but you do have to reference the object when printing to it. But there will only ever be one TextWindow in a program anyway. Apart from being pointless it could easily manage to get the beginner to confuse the concepts of classes and objects.

            Of course the old Print could print to more than one place... Print #X where X is channel (file descriptor, window number).

            1. sabroni Silver badge

              Re: Print #X where X is channel (file descriptor, window number).

              That's not better than TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World")

              Your suggestion has an optional parameter #X that abstracts the thing printed to into a number. How that is set up is not obvious. Presumably the string to write is now the second param...?

              TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World") has WriteLine as a function of the TextWindow object. If you look at the StatusBar object and see a WriteLine method you can have a good guess at what it's going to do. If you look at the AlertIcon object and see that is doesn't support WriteLine you know that component doesn't do the thing you want.

              How does that work with your #X shenanigans? How do I know #X supports WriteLine?

              More importantly TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World") is starting to use objects to group behaviour and from there we can move on to polymorphism and interfaces and start to actually write some robust, testable code.

              1. Dan 55 Silver badge

                Re: Print #X where X is channel (file descriptor, window number).

                Your suggestion has an optional parameter #X that abstracts the thing printed to into a number. How that is set up is not obvious. Presumably the string to write is now the second param...?

                The key is the #X was optional (I'm describing it in the past tense because it was a thing in the 1980s and 1990s BASICs and it sounds like you're not familiar with it). If you didn't want to get into that, you didn't have to. You didn't even need to know that you could put #X after a PRINT.

                You had a simple command to start with - PRINT "Hello world". Practically everyone got what it did.

                Finally one day some decided they needed to write to a file. The commands were a variation of OPEN #2;"filename" : PRINT #2; "Hello world" : CLOSE #2 . People already knew what PRINT did and built on what they already knew. Or maybe they opened a window on a screen. Same thing. They just had to understand that PRINT could really print to different things, not just a screen, and OPEN and CLOSE told it what that different thing was.

                I think people forget the idea is to teach languages to beginners and 10 year old kids. The modern-day BASIC is Scratch or Python. But C, C#, VB.Net, Java? It's absurd to even try. Maybe as a second or third language, but right off the bat? Pointless.

                So mangling a language which was designed for beginners into some C#, VB.Net, Java-like language with TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World") when there is only one text window anyway, why even bother? To crowbar some kind of object orientation in there which isn't even real object orientation? Small BASIC was BASIC bloated up into something that was more difficult to learn when what should have been done was a new second or third language called something other than BASIC.

                In every other area of education you start small and build on previously learnt knowledge, so why should software be any different from that?

                1. doublelayer Silver badge

                  Re: Print #X where X is channel (file descriptor, window number).

                  "In every other area of education you start small and build on previously learnt knowledge, so why should software be any different from that?"

                  Because many of the starter languages, probably including this one, have annoying limitations which hamper the education process in two ways:

                  Right up front, they can be incapable of some task that an actual language is capable of. If a student wants to write a program that actually performs a task but their language is incapable of it, it puts them off. If they are incapable of writing it yet because they don't know enough, then they can either be motivated to learn more so they can or someone more knowledgeable can abstract out some things for them. If their language just can't, they'll get frustrated by knowing that their tool will never do what they're trying to accomplish. It's not just that most of the things you do with Scratch involve moving a picture around the screen, but people may discover that that's all they're going to be able to do* and lose interest.

                  After that, you're making them start over and learn a language that gets actual use. If you taught them well and maintained their interest, they will have transferable skills, but they're not yet at your or my level. For us, learning a new language is probably not a big deal. The syntax will not take very much time, and we'll learn the standard libraries as we get to them. That's not the case for someone starting out. They've learned one language, and if it's Basic-inspired, they'll have learned a language that teaches them some harmful habits. I'm with Dijkstra on goto, and Basic tends to use it frequently. Even without that, students are learning a lot of things that were deliberately left out to try to simplify the language, but if that simplification actually resulted in cutting out the ability to do things and removing good program structure, it is not helping as much as it hurts.

                  * Technically, you can add some of your own behavior in Scratch. However, this isn't supported by the normal server, and if you are doing it, you're just writing in JavaScript.

                  1. Dan 55 Silver badge

                    Re: Print #X where X is channel (file descriptor, window number).

                    Right up front, they can be incapable of some task that an actual language is capable of. If a student wants to write a program that actually performs a task but their language is incapable of it, it puts them off.

                    Which is precisely my point with Small BASIC. Microsoft made all the wrong changes to BASIC and called it Small BASIC. Imagine the kid wants to open two windows - they can't. But they get all the fake OO baggage in the language.

                    They've learned one language, and if it's Basic-inspired, they'll have learned a language that teaches them some harmful habits.

                    Only if they learnt a limited BASIC, when even in the 80s on home computers there was BBC BASIC, QL SuperBASIC, SAM BASIC and there are modern BASICs now.

                    For us, learning a new language is probably not a big deal. The syntax will not take very much time, and we'll learn the standard libraries as we get to them. That's not the case for someone starting out. They've learned one language, and if it's Basic-inspired, they'll have learned a language that teaches them some harmful habits.

                    So? They'll learn another language with other harmful habits afterwards. There is no perfect language, but they need to start somewhere. 90% of us here started with BASIC and yet somehow most of us later managed to learn when to use goto and when not to.

                    I recognize BASIC is very niche these days, but Scratch and Python as beginner languages aren't. But as for teaching C# or Java or another C-inspired squiggle language with all its libraries at kids who haven't programmed a computer before then I'll let you go ahead first. I'm sure there are people who throw kids in the deep end to teach them to swim as well, and some of them even manage to learn.

                    1. doublelayer Silver badge

                      Re: Print #X where X is channel (file descriptor, window number).

                      The major difference between Scratch and Python as choices is that Python can do things and is used elsewhere and Scratch can't do anything useful and isn't. That is why Python is an acceptable choice and Scratch is not.

                      I find Python an acceptable choice. It has some downsides, notably its approach to typing. A language that requires you to state your types avoids confusion. If they used something like JavaScript that lets you treat any type as another type and doesn't complain, at least they'll get something out. Python's lack of explicit type declarations while being strict about what the types actually are can be a point of confusion. While I think this slows down the process a little, I don't mind it as it means they're still going to learn things. Python also has the benefit of letting people write useful software using a lot of libraries, so that is one thing in its favor. I think you assumed that I was a supporter of Microsoft's Basic thing, when in fact I have never used it and think it probably doesn't meet my standards. I just think an object-oriented structure is totally fine to have in an introductory language.

                      That doesn't make other languages difficult to teach people. I first learned C++ and Java. It was not hard to start with the idea that all my code had to go between the "public static void main() {" and the "}". The person explaining it to me managed to make me understand this very quickly: "The program runs the code in the main function first. Functions are a way of having different pieces of code which you can reorganize. Right now, you won't use more than one. You'll write multiple functions in two weeks." And I did. It wasn't hard to explain the concepts. Public and static got explained later. That was an informal instruction from a friend. A teacher can probably do even more.

                      1. Dan 55 Silver badge
                        Happy

                        Re: Print #X where X is channel (file descriptor, window number).

                        Out of morbid fascination, I'm compelled to ask, did you eschew Scratch and learn C++ and Java between 8-10 years old? Could you get similar results to Scratch as well? Did you use SDL/C++ or LWJGL/Java?

                        1. doublelayer Silver badge

                          Re: Print #X where X is channel (file descriptor, window number).

                          Your question about similar results confuses me. My objection to Scratch is that you can't really get results because, unless you write JavaScript for it, all you can do is move pictures around the screen. Of course, they've attached that to lots of concepts used in programming so you can choose to move a sprite as a result of a mathematical or logical operation, but your ability to build something else is hideously limited. Unless all you ever want to do is move sprites, you will need to do something else, and as with many graphical, block-based "languages", the limitations on what is possible are so severe that trying to teach those operations through it is more difficult than it would be using a language like Python.

                          As it happens, a book I learned Java from did indeed have a graphical thing because they also thought I might like to move some pictures around. I remember making it into a sort of game with their sample code handling graphics rendering because, unlike Scratch, I could take user input while the graphics moved. It wasn't a very good game. That was, admittedly, after writing many programs that were text only and I was 10-11, so somewhat outside your age range. That doesn't make those languages the best choices for everybody, but it is at least partially why I wouldn't automatically consider them unsuitable.

                          And your other question, neither of those libraries. I was self-learning things from books, websites, and an older child who agreed to teach me a couple things, so it was quite unorganized. The standard libraries and later, the proprietary example code out of a book was what I used to start with. There are certainly ways to do it better.

          2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

            Re: Everything has become so complicated

            But the difference is important for teaching.

            print("hello") or write("hello") or type("hello") are all equally good.

            from System.Output using Console.WriteLine("hello", locale=SYS$DEFAULT, security=compartment.modal, memory_exceptions=disable) might be vastly better for a provably correct safety-critical system with automatic checking, but isn't ideal for 8 year olds first introduction to computers.

            It's why C, Java and C# were terrible for intro programming. Lesson 1: copy all this boiler plate exactly correctly into your program before you can print("hello"). Don't worry about what "#include" or "sys.argv" does, you don't need to know. Leads to "computers are not for mere mortals to understand" which is the entire point of teaching about them in school

            1. doublelayer Silver badge

              Re: Everything has become so complicated

              I granted them that having to set up the window themselves would be a problem, but their one line looks nothing like the one you made up. It is much more similar to your three acceptable versions with the difference that "TextWindow.WriteLine" is more bytes. It's still one function call with one parameter which, according to them, didn't require extra setup. Also, I don't like your options equally. Print is a common one for that. Write can work, but since we're also going to have functions for writing to files called write, it doesn't make sense for a global function called write to guess this for us. Type is a terrible name because a program does not type a message onto a console.

              The problem with your example is that you insisted on adding irrelevant things when the things we're actually considering don't have them. Yes, to teach someone the basics of programming in C, you have to include something and have a main function before your fprintf(stdout, "Hello") works. However, the function they are writing takes only two parameters and they can and should be explained. What standard output is does not take a lot of technical knowledge to get across to a student. It doesn't require you to fiddle about with locales or memory allocation errors or any of the other specious examples you care to include.

              That doesn't mean you have to start with C, and I generally wouldn't recommend starting with it. I advise against it because, after they learn some basics mostly involving calculating and printing numbers which is about as easy in every language, they're going to want to start doing some small useful things. C makes most of those things hard and can put them off when they find it difficult to achieve anything they want to do. Python is popular because the vast number of libraries makes this simple, but several languages, can also do it. From your list, I would say that C# is relatively easy to do and Java can be used although there is a lot more boilerplate and JVM work that they will need to simply trust at the beginning which isn't ideal.

  9. karlkarl Silver badge

    The Pi is great but what makes me worry is why we had to wait almost three decades for something like it to come along.

    And once the Pi (and clones) disappear again. How long will we need to wait before open(ish) hobby hardware appears again?

    Remember, before the Pi appeared, the RISC OS community had been limping along with broken hardware or DRM encumbered emulators. The whole ecosystem is so dependent on the Pi that it almost makes you want to horde them for when times get hard again.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      "The Pi is great but what makes me worry is why we had to wait almost three decades for something like it to come along."

      Because, for all of the Pi's advantages, it's not like you couldn't do the same things with a laptop. Once Linux got mature enough that it mostly worked on hardware you had access to, you could use a laptop with the same software the Pi had. It didn't work so well for RISC OS because RISC OS had, and still has, a lot of ARM assembly in it which doesn't work very well on anything else, which is why it also doesn't run on most ARM SBCs out there either. Most other things were as or more functional with hardware available to the hobbyist, with the largest exception being the convenient GPIO pins and hardware designed around them. The former were available but more expensive, but a lot of the convenient peripherals were only made after the Pi proved that people were willing to buy them.

      Many interested people were building systems around old computers running Linux or BSD before they got a Pi to make it quieter and smaller. Others would take embedded devices, often old networking gear, and hack those to make them a platform for things that worked under resource constraints.

      As for the future, I think it's been clearly demonstrated that people use and are willing to buy SBCs. If the Raspberry Pi ones somehow crashed, it wouldn't stop the many competing manufacturers. They all provide at least the basics of a hobbyist-available board with a Linux base. Some of them do a better job than others at having updated images or mainline support (Raspberry Pi tends not to), and if Raspberry Pi ceased operating, then one of them would likely try to move into their market and succeed.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        The is an irony here.

        The need for the Pi was that school Windows systems had become so complicated that they needed specialist and expensive support - and so kids have to be restricted from not breaking it.

        While the PC was originally popular in business because the expensive mainframe needed specialist support and so users had to be kept from breaking it.

      2. werdsmith Silver badge

        No, you don’t install headless functions on a laptop and leave them running 24/7. Nor is it ideal to mount a laptop as a component in a wider project.

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Hobbyists have done both of those things. I have done both of those things. The small Eee PC was well-known for having internals ripped out to serve as brains for something else. It isn't ideal, which is why the Pi was a popular product. Industrial users tended to get products which were similar to a Pi, but more custom and thus more expensive. In both cases, the availability of SBCs improved the situation, but it did not invent something that nobody had ever seen before. That improvement is why SBCs are going to continue to be made, even if the Raspberry Pi people somehow failed. However, it's not correct to say that it took three decades to get it (I'm also not sure what we had in 1982 which started that clock). It's as inaccurate as saying that we didn't have smartphones until Apple made the iPhone or we didn't have digital audio until the MP3 algorithm got written. Those were improvements but not the first version of a technology.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            So true! When you stop and think about it, apart from the very earliest 8080 based stuff, pretty much every 8-bit micro from the late 70's through the 80's was an SBC, especially if you look at stuff like ZX-80/81, Oric etc sans keyboard. They weren't much bigger than today's Pi's. ANd with those system, even the early 16-bit systems, a single person could learn about the the entire system, hardware and software, and how it all worked. As someone mentioned further up, starting out as a beginner nowadays is much harder because apart from Arduinos and their ilk, most system are just too "big" and complex for a single person to understand the entire package of hardware and software. (and even now, there are people doing stuff on stock retro kit that we were never able to do back in the day simply because it wasn't thought possible - back-porting ideas from modern tech is a thing in the retro world, especially in the demo scene)

            1. druck Silver badge

              Back in 1987 I was using an SBC version of the BBC Micro (2" square PC with a 6502 and BBC BASIC ROM) in a variety of industrial non destructive test equipment, we used for checking welds in everything from axel stubs to power stations. In the time between that and the Pi coming out, everything seemed to either go down the route of custom embedded devices, or interface cards attached to standard PCs. I'm glad the good old days are back again!

      3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        "Many interested people were building systems around old computers running Linux or BSD before they got a Pi to make it quieter and smaller. "

        I remember when Damn Small Linux fitted on a single floppy disk. IIRC there were other specialist "distros" for firewalls and file-servers etc you could boot from a floppy and run entirely in a very small amount of RAM :-)

        These days, we are impressed by squeezing an entire OS onto a single CD-ROM. (Grandad, what's a CD-ROM?)

  10. Pete 2 Silver badge

    It's the software, stupid

    > Try finding anything near as good.

    There are dozens of hardware platforms that exceed the tech-specs of corresponding Pi boards. The reason that none of them have eaten a raspberry flavoured lunch is their abysmal software support.

    Support that comes from the Pi ecosystem of experienced programmers willing and able to write the low-level libraries to allow these more functional and capable boards to work with the ease of a Pi.

  11. heyrick Silver badge

    Not exciting?

    I can get a nice form factor reasonably capable and ridiculously efficient machine for a tad over a hundred euros. Granted, it won't run Windows, but these days that's probably a good thing.

    Maybe the only reason it isn't more exciting is because we're spoilt for choice these days?

  12. This post has been deleted by its author

  13. jpennycook
    Coat

    Turtles

    > What is needed is the system software equivalent of Lego

    I read that as Logo, and longed for the days when life was simple and I could play with Turtle to make strange patterns

    1. Loudon D'Arcy

      Re: Turtles

      JP, you might want to bookmark this one...

      BBC Horizon – Talking Turtle [46 min, 57 secs]

  14. fromxyzzy

    The 'turn on and go' and 'jump into basic' thesis seems to be completely covered by RISC OS, right? Boots instantly, hit a key to reach BBC BASIC, runs on Pi.

    Weird I searched all the comments and only one person mentioned it. Checking the Raspberry site, I also see they've removed it from their downloads page and from the list in the Imager app. Perhaps that'd be the place to start.

    1. ThomH Silver badge

      RISC OS does not support the Pi 5 or, by extension, the 500. It's just not easily adaptable to 64-bit computing — lots and lots of assembly language, and ARM64 is a breaking change — and has insufficiently many contributors to get it done quickly the hard way.

      1. werdsmith Silver badge

        But RISCOS does run very nicely on the £9.60 Raspberry Pi Zero. You don’t need anything more.

        You wouldn’t sensibly buy a Pi 5 for RISCOS. Though I have never tried, it might well run in an emulating VM.

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          I don't know how much the Pi Zero has advanced from the ARM2 in the Archimedes but, 1GHz 64bit CPUand 512MB RAM compared to 32bit 8MHz and 1 Mb of RAM - so lander should certainly go a bit faster !

  15. J. Cook Silver badge
    Go

    I will note that the RP2040 microcontrollers have a pretty solid spot on my desk: I have one running as a macropad, and another one running as an ARGB controller (or will once I get the custom PCBs I had fabricated delivered and built). None of the arduino's have the horsepower to run those tasks with the flexibility that these little critters have.

    I also have a pair of Pis (a v3 and a v4) running Pi-hole on my network, something that they've been doing for a few years, and frankly, I need to build a fresh new image of both of them as they are passively outdated, OS wise. Sure, I could have picked up a couple cheap USFF boxes, installed linux on them along with Pi-hole, but then there's moving parts (mostly cooling fans) and they drink FAR more power than what I currently have.

    I have a third Pi4 that was running OctoPi for the older 3d printer, which is taking a break until I get more bench space cleared for it, and a fourth that has been a test bed for a voice-assistant thing I've been wanting to cobble together.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > None of the arduino's have the horsepower to run those tasks with the flexibility that these little critters have

      There are more Arduinos than are dreamt of in your philosophy:

      https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-nano-rp2040-connect-with-headers

      (although a Pico v1 *is* a lot cheaper than that!)

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge
  16. Caspian Prince
    Thumb Up

    Never mind Linux!

    ...get Pico-8 on it, and rejoice in the joy you once had when you flicked the on-switch on your C64. Yes, really, it's that same hit.

  17. Snowy Silver badge
    Big Brother

    No

    The new $90 Pi 500 complete desktop computer is what it would look like if the company was run Jobs, features removed for seemingly no reason other then them be able to be put back in later on.

    Steve Woz would have produced something better.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wintel didn't kill the Amiga

    ... Commodore killed the Amiga themselves by sheer ineptitude, terrible management, short sightedness and greed (particularly of Irving Gould and Medhi Ali).

    Absolutely no guarantee they'd still be around today and that Wintel wouldn't have killed them off of course anyway had things been otherwise but the downfall of Commodore (and hence Amiga) was entirely their own fault.

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Wintel didn't kill the Amiga

      Exactly. We had 3D and video editing for the home with the Amiga long before anyone else. And a well organized desktop interface.

      And they killed it.

  19. GNU Enjoyer
    Unhappy

    >The Raspberry Pi is a moral hazard because it's been far too good to us.

    The Raspberry Pi's are a moral hazard because they're proprietary broadcom garbage, that attacks the user with proprietary software running on the VPU, that also does not have schematics detailed enough to allow repair officially published.

    They're 3.3V, they do come with an acceptable number of GPIOs (something totally lacking on modern computers, you get only usb and not even RS-232 or a parallel port) and you can easily get your hands on an old model someone has stopped using.

    If only the free software VPU replacement was ready, Raspberry Pi's would be usable in freedom; `git clone https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware`

    Arduino's are much nicer for GPIO use really (no OS boot to have to wait on and no SD card that corrupts all the time), too bad they're 5V and when modded to 3.3V are lacking in drive strength.

    >that hardware is coupled to a full Linux environment.

    What on earth is a "full Linux environment"? - you either have Linux as the kernel, or you don't (i.e. you run Hurd or a BSD kernel instead).

    They run systemd/Linux, which includes all base GNU software and libraries to give an acceptable GNU environment.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      "What on earth is a "full Linux environment"? - you either have Linux as the kernel, or you don't"

      I grant that it's not a technical term, but what it usually means, and what I'd appreciate a term for, is a Linux environment in which you are allowed and able to modify things with ease. Primarily opposed to boards or devices that run Android, where there's most definitely a Linux kernel under there, but you first have to wrestle with things to unlock the bootloader, then manually make or patch something so you can replace it, then any attempt to remove mysterious things causes the device not to boot anymore, and only after you fix those three things can you actually start modifying the environment. To some extent, it also means that software intended to run under Linux can run on the environment, which offers a variety of options for how severe you want to be.

      1. GNU Enjoyer
        Angel

        >what I'd appreciate a term for, is a Linux environment in which you are allowed and able to modify things with ease.

        That's called a GNU (or GNU/Linux or LiGNUx) environment, with full GNU/Freedom.

        Most Linux developers go out of their way to tolerate restrictive environments by not enforcing the GPLv2 when it comes to installation information (or not at all); "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the ***executable***." - but that's to be expected for developers who care about "tit-for-tat" and quick development and not user freedom.

        >Primarily opposed to boards or devices that run Android, where there's most definitely a Linux kernel under there

        I don't understand this line of thinking - as such environments have the exact same Linux in them, with the only real differences being a custom .config, a usually very old version and sometimes blatantly proprietary Linux modules.

        The difference is that those devices don't have GNU and usually only include free software under a weak license (and that software is usually proprietarized).

        >it also means that software intended to run under Linux can run on the environment

        Such software is generally intended to run under glibc and be compiled by GCC, which is a good thing, as that's the best libc and the best compiler and therefore is intended to run on LiGNUx.

        Software that actually interfaces with Linux's SYSCALL, /sys, /proc and/or /dev APIs is somewhat rare and even then usually does compile and run just fine on GNU/Hurd (it has a SYSCALL emulation library and I believe implements /dev, /sys and maybe even /proc partially).

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          No, that's not what it is called. You know that already, I think.

          Whether I can replace things is not related to whether GNU tools are in there. For example, OpenWRT lets me access any part of the system from the bootloader on up if they can, and they usually can. There are no GNU tools in it. You can also have GNU tools atop a Linux that I can't replace with firmware that's been locked down as long as those tools can be replaced. You also seem to have your GPL V2 and GPL v3 mixed up, since it is v3 that requires installation information and Linux is v2. You also blame Linux developers for allowing people to violate the license (for a violation that isn't possible) when those violations that do exist are not due to any failing from the developers. It's true that the things V2 requires of device manufacturers are sometimes, even often, not done, but it is those manufacturers that are at fault.

  20. bloomingeek

    I want a Pi 500, but...

    My daily driver PC is a Rasp Pi 5 with the SSD and fan hats. The speed boost of the SSD and the included 8GB of ram, makes it ideal for web surfing, email, YouTube, etc. The OS I chose is Ubuntu, it just works. Is it my understanding I can't add the SSD hat to the Pi 500 because there's not enough room?

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