| ▲ | Aurornis 3 days ago |
| > The device is largely useless due to a lack of software support. I think everyone considering an SBC should be warned that none of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be. Even the Raspberry Pi 5, one of the most well supported of the SBCs, is still getting trickles of mainline support. The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing. |
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| ▲ | mikepurvis 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| "none of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be" Going big-name doesn't even help you here. It's the same story with Nvidia's Jetson platforms; they show up, then within 2-3 years they're abandonware, trapped on an ancient kernel and EOL Ubuntu distro. You can't build a product on this kind of support timeline. |
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| ▲ | bri3d 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | For what it’s worth, Jetson at least has documentation, front ported / maintained patches, and some effort to upstream. It’s possible with only moderate effort and no extensive non-OEM source modification to have an Orin NX running an OpenEmbedded based system using the OE4T recipes and a modern kernel, for example, something that isn’t really possible on most random label SBCs. | |
| ▲ | yonatan8070 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yup, I'm working a lot with Jetsons, and having the Orin NX on 22.04 is quite limiting sometimes, even with the most basic things. I got a random USB Wi-Fi dongle for it, and nope! Not supported in kernel 5.15, now have fun figuring out what to do with it. |
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| ▲ | gspr 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that these are not the best options for general purpose computing. If we take a step back, I think this is something to be saddened by. I, too, find boards without proper mainline support to be e-waste, and I am glad that we perhaps aren't producing quite as much of that anymore. But imagine if a good chunk of these boards did indeed have great mainline support. These incredibly cheap devices would be a perfect guarantor of democratized, unstoppable general compute in the face of the forces that many of us fear are rising. Even if that's not a fear you share, they'd make the perfect tinkering environment for children and adults not otherwise exposed to such things. |
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| ▲ | bdavbdav 2 days ago | parent [-] | | So don N100s / N150s - often cheaper and better. | | |
| ▲ | gspr 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Sure. But a heterogenous environment is interesting. And I wouldn't put all my eggs in one product line. |
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| ▲ | cptskippy 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is declining, Were people actually doing that? |
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| ▲ | hnuser123456 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | More like people try doing anything other than use the base OS, and realize the bottom-tier x86 mini-PCs are 3-4x faster for the same price, and can encode a basic video stream without bogging down. If the RPI came with any recent mid-tier Snapdragon SOC, it might be interesting. Or if someone made a Linux distro that supports all devices on one of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops, that would be interesting. Instead, it's more like the equivalent of a cheap desktop with integrated GPU from 20 years ago, on a single board, with decent linux support, and GPIO. So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between. | | |
| ▲ | adrian_b 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Qualcomm has rebranded a Snapdragon with quadruple Cortex-A78 cores (and 4 small Cortex-A55), from the expensive smartphones of 2021, as "Dragonwing" QCM6490 and they now sell it for embedded devices. There are at least 3 or 4 SBCs with it, in RPI sizes and prices. Cortex-A78 is much faster than the Cortex-A76 from RK3588 or the latest RPI (e.g. at least 50% faster at the same clock frequency), and its speed at the same clock frequency does not differ much from that of recent medium-size cores like Cortex-A720 or Cortex-A725. Cortex-A78 is the stage when Arm stopped making significant micro-architectural changes in medium-sized cores. The later improvements were in the bigger Cortex-X cores. The main disadvantage of the older Cortex-A78 is that it does not implement the SVE instruction set of the Armv9-A ISA. While mini-PCs with Intel/AMD CPUs are usually preferable, for an ARM SBC I would no longer buy any model that has older cores than Cortex-A78. Besides the Qualcomm Dragonwing based SBCs, there are also Cortex-A78 based SBCs with Mediatek or NVIDIA CPUs, but those are more expensive. | |
| ▲ | overfeed 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between. Raspberry Pi are excellent at being general-purpose, full-Linux boxes that consume very low power (some can idle at <1W). Perfect for ambient computing, cron-jobs, MQTT-related hackery, VPN gateways, ad-blocking DNS servers, or anything else that isn't CPU-bound, but benefits from being always available[1]. 1. In my case, this ironically includes orchestrating higher-wattage computers via Wake-on-Lan and powering them down when not needed | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Bottom tier computers were more than $25. | | |
| ▲ | ssl-3 2 days ago | parent [-] | | They still are. They always have been. Since the introduction of the OG Raspberry Pi, 14 years ago, there's been an ongoing cognitive problem wherein people look at the price of a brand new, never used SBC that can purchased from a reliable retail company. Then they also look at the price of a used corpo PC (that is bigger, and noisier) that some rando in Iowa is selling on eBay. And then they boldly compare the prices of the two things as if these details just don't exist. But the details do exist. The details show that the two things are not the same. They can never be the same. One is a shiny fresh apple that is free of blemishes, and the other is a bruised old grapefruit that someone has already started eating. They're both fruit, but they're very different things. |
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| ▲ | colechristensen 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's tiny and low power, I run CI on a Pi5 and do a few other things and experiments on them. |
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| ▲ | Tor3 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've used them for mostly dedicated tasks, at least the RPi3 and older. I've used the RPi3 as CUPS servers at a couple of sites, for a few printers. Been running for many years now 24/7 with no issues. As I could buy those SBCs for the original low price and the installation was a total no-brainer, I would never consider using any kind of mini PC for that. I have a couple of RPi4 with 8GB and 4GB RAM respectively, these I have been using as kind-of general computers (they're running off SSDs instead of SD cards). I've had no reason so far to replace them with anything Intel/AMD. On the other hand they can't replace my laptop computer - though I wish they could, as I use the laptop computer with an external display and external keyboard 100% of the time, so its form factor is just in the way. But there's way too little RAM on the SBCs. It's bad enough on the laptop computer, with its measly 16GB. | | |
| ▲ | mikestorrent 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I built a nice little cyberdeck around an RPi 5 but it's turned out to be very disappointing. I was counting on classic X11's virtual display stuff to enable a 1080x480 screen to be usable with panning (virtual 720p or something, just a cool vertical pan). Problem is, the X11 support sucks, and so there's almost no 2D acceleration, so this simple thing that used to work great on a 486 with an ATI SVGA doesn't work very well at all on a machine a thousand times faster. Wayland has of course no support for a feature like this one, so I'm stuck with a screen too narrow to use, and performance for everything else that's pretty sub-par. | | |
| ▲ | Tor3 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Aah, I had totally forgotten about that X11 feature, I did use it for something very many years ago.
I have only used the default setup (which is presumably Wayland) on the Pi, looks good but I don't actually use display features much. | |
| ▲ | sellmesoap 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I haven't tried it myself but niri might do what you want using Wayland https://github.com/niri-wm/niri |
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| ▲ | chromacity 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Raspberry Pi was and is selling official desktop kits: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-desktop-... I wouldn't wish it upon an enemy, but it's a thing. | |
| ▲ | aj_hackman 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I daily drove my Raspberry Pi 5 for all of 2024. It primarily compiled tons of C++ and served 1080p video via Jellyfin, and it did so flawlessly. | |
| ▲ | bluGill 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They are cheap and seem like the hardware is good enough. The hardware is, but getting software support very diy. | |
| ▲ | Schlagbohrer 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah Raspi even sells a keyboard formfactor and there was a Raspi laptop made from 3D printable casing and basic peripherals (screen, keyboard with mouse nub) for it. A cheap quasi-open source laptop at the time. | |
| ▲ | unethical_ban 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They probably define general purpose as anything homelab based that runs on a commodity OS. | |
| ▲ | alexjplant 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | People do all manner of wacky stuff with Pis that could be more easily done with traditional machines. Kubernetes clusters and emulation boxes are the more common use cases; the former can be done with VMs on a desktop and the latter is easily accomplished via a used SFF machine off of eBay. I've also heard multiple anecdotes of people building Pi clusters to run agentic development workflows in parallel. I think in all cases it's the sheer novelty of doing something with a different ISA and form factor. Having built and racked my share of servers I see no reason to build a miniature datacenter in my home but, hey, to each their own. | | |
| ▲ | mikestorrent 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I concur with this. The novelty of the Pi is getting a computer somewhere that you normally wouldn't due to the size and complexity. GPIO is a very nice addition, but it looks like conventional USB to GPIO is a thing so it's not really a huge driver to use a Pi. |
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| ▲ | elevation 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Even the Raspberry Pi 5 [...] is still getting trickles of mainline support. I thought raspberry pi could basically run a mainline kernel these days -- are there unsupported peripherals besides Broadcom's GPU? |
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| ▲ | geerlingguy 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It takes a few years, but the Broadcom chips in Pis eventually get mainline support for most peripherals, similar to modern Rockchip SoCs. The major difference is Raspberry Pi maintains a parallel fork of Linux and keeps it up to date with LTS and new releases, even updating their Pi OS to later kernels faster than the upstream Debian releases. | | |
| ▲ | QuantumNomad_ 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Also, unlike a lot of other manufacturers who only provide builds of Linux for their own hardware for a couple of years, it seems that even the latest version of the official Raspberry Pi OS supports every Raspberry Pi model all the way back to the first one with the 32-bit version of the OS. Likewise, the 64-bit version of the OS looks like it supports every Raspberry Pi model that has a 64-bit CPU. https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/ | | |
| ▲ | enoeht 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I can confirm that even my first rpi from over a decade still runs fine with newest dietpi. | |
| ▲ | denkmoon 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah I was very impressed at being able to download a raspi image last year for my original pi model B, most companies would have just told me to throw it in the bin and buy the new one (at 10x the price lol) |
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| ▲ | alexpotato a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wonder if this will change with LLMs. It's now way easier to write drivers/libraries etc whereas before, smaller hardware wasn't worth dedicating developer cycles. |
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| ▲ | bdavbdav 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Good. ESPs are better for low power IO. Cheap desktop HW / mini pcs are better for tinkering environments. |
