I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering. In the past, freedom meant a lot to tinkerers. My sense is that this is not so true today. Perhaps I am wrong. It may be that few people respect licensing enough to care. As long as somebody (not necessarily the producer) has made a youtube video of how to hack something, that's good enough.

This was probably always true. Replace youtube with Byte magazine and it was probably the same 45 years ago. I wonder if the percentage of true FOSS adherents has changed much. It would be a bit of a paradox if the percent of FOSS software has exploded and the percent of FOSS adherents has declined.

Note: I mean "adherent" to mean something different than "user".

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Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I think Arduino and RPi demonstrate that there is still a relatively strong attraction for tinkering

Raspberry Pi is an interesting example because it is constantly criticized by people who complain about the closed source blobs, the non-open schematics, and other choices that don’t appease the purists.

Yet it does a great job at letting users do what they want to do with it, which is get to using it. It’s more accessible than the open counterparts, more available, has more guides, and has more accessories.

The situation has a lot of parallels to why people use Windows instead of seeking alternatives: It’s accessible, easy, and they can focus on doing what they want with the computer.

	▲	bayindirh 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The problems with SBCs are primarily software. I have a ton of SBCs, mostly Raspberry Pis and OrangePis. OrangePi boards are great. Zero is almost stamp sized, plus and pro has tons of options and on-board NVMe + fast-ish eMMC with great official cases, whatnot. But, guess what? The OS is bad. I mean, unpatched, mishmashed, secured as an open door bad. You get an OS installation which drops you to root terminal automatically on terminal output. There are many services which you don't need on board. There's an image, not an installer, and all repositories look to Chinese servers. Armbian is not a good solution, because it's not designed to rollover like Debian and RasberryPi OS. So you can't build any long-term system from them like you can build with RaspberryPi. On top of that, you can't boot anything mainline on most of them because either drivers are closed source, or the Kernel has weird hacks to make things work, or generally both. So, what makes Raspberry Pi is not the hardware, but software support.

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mrstackdump 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think tinkering is the dominant culture behind tech anymore, but it's definitely operating at a higher scale than ever before. There's more OSS projects than ever, and there are tons of niche areas with entire communities. Examples could include: LoRa radios (or LoRA adaptors!), 3d printing, FPGA hacking, new games for retro hardware...

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bayindirh 6 hours ago | parent [-]

There was a gap before (think 90s and early 2000s) where there was a niche tinkering and more mainstream user/power user/programmer crowds. All these groups have knowledge gaps between them, but the gap was surmountable.

Now, the groups have drifted apart. Even if you're a programmer, unless you care or get excited about the hardware, you don't know how things work. You follow the docs, push the code to magical gate via that magical command, and that works. It's similar even for Desktop applications.

When you care about performance, and try to understand how these things work, you need to break that thick ice to start learning things, and things are much more complicated now, so people just tend to run away and pretend that it's not there.

Also, since the "network is reliable, computing cheap" gospel took hold, 90% of the programmers don't care about how much performance / energy they waste.

	▲	dajt 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm guilty of this. I started with a C64 and love hardware and programming, but modern CPUs and MCUs are so complicated I can't be bothered learning about them. The old 8-bit Arduinos were pretty understandable, but with an ESP-32 I just assume the compiler knows what it's doing and that the Espressif libs are 'good enough'.