The Raspberry Pi probably still has the advantage of an actually robust firmware/software ecosystem? The problem with SBCs has always been that the software situation is awful. That was the Raspberry Pi's real innovation: Raspbian and a commitment to openness.

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cbm-vic-20 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fragmentation in the non-x86 world really hurts adoption. RPi presents a very well documented configuration that can be used as a target for development.

RISC-V is going through this exact same problem right now. All of the current implementations have terrible documentation, and tailoring Linux for each of these is proving to be difficult. All of these vendors include on-board devices that have terrible doc and software support.

	▲	bitwize 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ARM has a mitigation for this called SystemReady. It's basically "does your board support UEFI enough to usefully boot a battery of generic ARM Linux images". The Raspberry Pi can be made SystemReady, and Radxa also makes SystemReady-compliant SBCs you can buy. RISC-V would do well to adopt and promote a similar spec.

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vachina 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The problem with SBCs has always been that the software situation is awful

Awful how? A SBC can take advantage of many software written from the dawn of x86.

	▲	sam_lowry_ 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		x86 SBCs are niche, and ARM or RISC SBCs are too complex to figure out the boot process and the drivers for an average tinkerer.