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squarefoot

Unobtanium as everything Raspberry Pi today.

So Why not this one which is roughly the same thing but is available for purchase in hundreds?

http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontro...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyRGnLPBe8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS7qhKF8wGE

I know the Raspberry Pi has that huge community behind, but alternatives like this one can spark the interest of kids who need incentives to grow, and this one offers well above the minimum necessary without serving them the whole dinner ready to eat. When I cut my teeth with M68k asm in the early 90s all I had was a terrible book poorly translated in Italian whose code examples were written half in German and half in English, a local BBS and no Internet; they can do a lot more with today's tools without any need of a huge community.

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$136 on Amazon ($99 from AliExpress). Color me very impressed. Given the modern web, probably too under-powered to be a great experience for a daily driver, but probably not terrible if you are not a tab addict like myself.

My problem is the ARM chip and how likely I am going to have problems running a non-blessed OS on the thing. A year from now, will it be able to install a new kernel?

I also have to face reality in that I have zero real applications for the thing other than a cute novelty. I think almost everyone would be better served by a NUC ($400+) or refurbished SFF PC ($100-200 can be very competitive hardware).

Even Microsoft is going full steam ahead on arm64. It's here to stay.

> My problem is the ARM chip and how likely I am going to have problems running a non-blessed OS on the thing.

ARM shouldn't be a problem for a long time; there's a huge number of boards out there using that architecture and most of them are well supported by Linux. Here are some Armbian images: https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/opi800/ The user is reliable and a regular Armbian contributor/maintainer.

> zero real applications for the thing other than a cute novelty

I think the main selling point of these devices is for kids to carry them in their backpack when they study with their friends, so that they have all their stuff in a single device that is more usable and safe than a cellphone and needs only a video connection, without messing with the family computer. A relatively low cost independent device with exposed gpio ports could also have some uses in a lab to drive external hardware, microcontrollers programming, etc. If I had one I would probably use it for such tasks, including audio measurement by adding an external sound card.

> Unobtanium as everything Raspberry Pi today.

You picked a bad time to complain about this, because a whole bunch of Pi 400s have been popping up in stock over the past few days.

rpilocator doesn't track the 400, but they do tweet when they see them in stock: https://twitter.com/rpilocator

As for "why not" the alternatives, it's because they get no ongoing support, and don't run mainline Linux, so you're stuck with what they ship with, and can never update them.

All the raspberry pi alternatives have some really Achilles heel software problems where they don't properly support everything the raspberry pi does. I will never buy one just because I want to run software on these computers and 90% of the time the thing I want to just doesn't support these things natively.

How can you know about them if you'll never buy one, and I presume you don't have any? I have all RPis minus the CMs, the Zeros and the 400, then I also have a bunch of Orange Pis and NanoPis, one old Hackberry A10, one Odroid C2 and a couple Beaglebones I just bought used and still have to find the use for (possibly network services because of eMMC better reliability compared to sdcard). I loved playing with all of them, including the RPis. I however stopped buying Raspberries (except maybe the Pico which I find a lot more interesting than the bigger ones) because of both their insane pricing and that "alternative"[0] boards can do whatever I need, and if something doesn't work, which happens rarely, I'm pretty sure it can be sorted out by searching and trial+error.

[0] Industrial boards aside (PC104 et al.) which predate those boards by a decade at least, for people who were playing with stuff like the Foxboard LX832 [1] as soon as it was released (2006), the Raspberry Pi became later the alternative, not the other way around. Granted, the Etrax 100lx was slow as a dead sloth compared to the RPi1 BCM, RAM and storage were constrained, and no WiFi, but hey, it ran Linux! I sold them on Ebay long ago, but kept their super cool Tux shaped plastic case [2].

[1] https://www.acmesystems.it/FOXLX

[2] https://www.acmesystems.it/oldtux

I can know about them without purchasing them by looking up support for the software I want to run and seeing if it supports these boards.

One problem with this for kids is if it is connected to the monitor with a cable, kids used to wireless keyboard may try to grab it and get a surprise when it gets disconnected or pulls the monitor down with the keyboard.

That would certainly be an important lesson.

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