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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

Whatever happened to NetBSD being the version that ran on everything? I discovered the other day that it took them years to even run properly on the Raspberry Pi.

Are they short of money or developers, or is the famed portability of it just not as true as it used to be?

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The Raspberry Pis are hostile towards non-Linux systems.

How so?

They were designed to run Linux to be cheap so other OSes need drivers.

A lot of the hardware on the board has vendor support in Linux and only Linux. Vendors will write drivers and upstream them to Linux and then just call it a day. You can't get the manuals for those components except under NDA, which makes open source development for non-Linux operating systems a huge pain in the ass.

Yeah they're even borderline hostile to non raspbian systems. When a new Pi comes out it usually only works for raspbian for quite some time until others put in the work of getting the right stuff together for other distros.

I love raspberry pi but they are definitely not as "open" and drop-in compatible as most people think.

That seems to be a problem with most ARM devices, so may not be specific or the fault of the Pi people.

Non-debian would be better, no? Never had an issue with Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is very closely related to Debian. I'm not sure I'd count it as a "different distribution" so much as "a weird variant of Debian".

Yes but Raspbian is also 'a weird variant of Debian' by that line right? I think you're in agreement with GP; I find a similar thing coming up with Arch & Manjaro (an Arch derivative) - for almost any purpose when someone says 'Arch' it applied to Manjaro too (just less often vice versa).

So, yes, 'non-Debian' which (Debian) includes Raspbian, not 'non-Raspbian' which (Raspbian) precludes Debian.

Yeah I agree, I consider Raspbian "a weird variant of Debian." They add a bunch of packages (some that override upstream debian) and they have some custom software, plus a lot of other customization.

Raspbian is probably closer to Debian than Ubuntu is, but it's still quite clear that you're not on Debian.

Raspian, RaspberryPi OS, Ubuntu etc are all known as derivatives of Debian, since they are directly or indirectly derived from Debian.

https://www.debian.org/derivatives/ https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives

Ubuntu is Debian (architecturally), plus the stuff Ubuntu added, so I believe the latter is more practically accurate.

Raspbian is as well, which is why making the statement about it being weird on non-debian seems more apt (ha!) than saying non-Raspbian.

I also never had an issue with Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi. They even provide packages to update the EEPROM.

But it doesn’t surprise me that it just works since Ubuntu is a commercial distro. They even sell products for the Raspberry Pi version.

How soon after a new Pi model comes out do you try? If you wait 6 months then yes, Ubuntu tends to work fine (although you do still need a specific build. You can't just download a generic one).

I used to use Ubuntu MATE on pi, but when the Pi4 came out it took a long time before it was supported.

I tried within a week or two of the cm4 releasing. This may be unfair due to the similarities of the pi4 and the cm4. I’ll know better when pi5 releases. I heavily utilize these in my work, and have great incentive to have new pi’s supported on Ubuntu immediately:)

I mean do they have the manpower to keep up with 12 different distros? Don't they opensource everything they do so other distro users can figure it out?

I assume parent isn't talking about creating SD card images for 12 different distros, but rather working with upstream developers so more stuff is mainlined earlier thus being useful to everybody.

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