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.