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> - people saying that there are "more performant" devices. Sure, there are. How do they perform in terms of kernel support and documentation?

One of the main options pointed at is low-power x86 boxes, which are better than Pis ever were. The rest of the ARM ecosystem is, I agree, poor.

> - people (often Americans) saying that the Pi has been "supply-constrained for five years". It really hasn't; it wasn't particularly supply-constrained in the UK until about five or six months into the pandemic.

Then it really has; there being a supply in the UK isn't exactly useful to most of the world.

> What I don't understand is this: how is it, if you've not been able to get hold of something for _five_ years, there's been no obvious co-ordinated attempts to get mainline support for the alternatives, or even any attempt to match the documentation? Five years was plenty of time to pick a single series of devices and match the same level of kernel support, surely? Couldn't it have been crowdfunded?

Partially, nobody was expecting it to actually take that long. If at the start of the shortage we'd known it was going to be 5 years, there probably would have been more of a push. OTOH some of the alternatives have been getting more polished.

> It's almost as if most of the people whining are just upset there isn't a cheap device they can drop into a Kodi box without any effort.

Okay. Yes? That's a valid usecase.

> One of the main options pointed at is low-power x86 boxes, which are better than Pis ever were.

In terms of what? Battery usage at idle? BOM to operationalize the design? Surely not.

> > It's almost as if most of the people whining are just upset there isn't a cheap device they can drop into a Kodi box without any effort.

> Okay. Yes? That's a valid usecase.

Funny enough, all throughout the pandemic the one thing that kept being made was Android streaming boxes. I'm pretty sure it's dead simple to wipe those and put Kodi on them. So it's not much of a valid use-case. (I'd instead expect most hobbyists who want Pis, to actually want them for running game-console emulators — specifically, emulators for consoles new enough that those weaker streaming boxes would struggle with them.)

The Pi is not stellar in terms of battery usage at idle, either. Its CPU doesn't have proper power management handling, which is why all homemade raspi-based phones/tablets/etc have a <6hr battery life.

Some of those Android TV boxes actually had pirated apps of various kinds - and SoCs that were gimped to the extent where you really needed the source to rebuild that particular version of Android.

>>> - people saying that there are "more performant" devices. Sure, there are. How do they perform in terms of kernel support and documentation?

>> One of the main options pointed at is low-power x86 boxes, which are better than Pis ever were. The rest of the ARM ecosystem is, I agree, poor.

> In terms of what? Battery usage at idle? BOM to operationalize the design? Surely not.

I was responding to kernel support; x86 boxes can usually just run straight mainline Linux with no problem, which is far better than most of the ARM ecosystem (even Pis aren't running mainline, they're just a well-supported downstream).

> Android streaming boxes. I'm pretty sure it's dead simple to wipe those and put Kodi on them

There are alternatives, but then we're back to spotty support, fragmented ecosystems, and using a Pi for video streaming is still a valid usecase.

> Then it really has; there being a supply in the UK isn't exactly useful to most of the world.

There being a shortage in the US isn't exactly relevant to most of the world.

lol , nowhere its available.

I've bought several over the past few years, including during the pandemic, without any issues from some local distributors in the EU.

Can you give some examples of the low-power x86 boxes? As of my last knowledge update :) none of them took off

HP T620 is one of the popular ones.

> - people saying that there are "more performant" devices. Sure, there are. How do they perform in terms of kernel support and documentation?

And Pi isn't even supported fully in upstream kernel! And it's so much worse in competitors...

> The truth is that the Raspberry Pi SBCs are unique because they are the product of their funding model. If you want "more performant" devices that are as good, you might need to front up the cash.

Not really. The key point why people want it is that they are by far most seamless product out of the competition (sans maybe some x86 ones I guess). 3rd-party patched kernel is always PITA especially over long lifetime but rPi got theirs in "near vanilla" debian-derivative so there is very little friction. And on top of that of course ecosystem that grew around it.

*if* there was competitor that have similar featureset yet work at 100% vanilla kernel there would be a chance but there is always some problem to deal with.

Right. I guess what I mean about "product of their funding model" is that you do not get a seamless, joined-up-design product at this price point, with that much community buy-in, that much documentation etc., without the Raspberry Pi's origin story.

Any number of companies have tried to do this and failed, because you don't get to _here_ by just launching a new commercial, cost-effective, powerful small product and hoping it gets supported. You get to what the Pi is now by starting the way they did.

It sometimes surprises me that the US market, with its many tech billionaires, has not managed to achieve anything similar. To the point that at least one US tech billionaire (Eric Schmidt) has backed the Pi Foundation instead, because it's doing the actual work.

People doing real projects with deadlines find another solution and don’t whine about it on message boards

You forgot all the people who forget there are N5095 (and now N100) mini-PCs galore at pretty reasonable prices these days.

Prices over $100 are not really competing with Pis.

For a living room/desktop use case, where you’d have to buy a case and storage, they are.

A pi case is $3 plus shipping.

If my goal was attaching several terabytes I'd be even less inclined to spend $120 rather than $40 on the computer, but for living room/desktop use case half a terabyte is plenty and only costs $30. So that's $150 vs. $70 total.