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Comment by TechBro8615 | Hacker News Reader

And/or maybe demand has decreased as people have settled on alternative boards...

I started with Raspberry Pi years ago but now prefer FriendlyELEC NanoPi and OrangePi, both running Armbian. Armbian has some performance tweaks that RPi doesn't have, especially the use of zram to minimize system writes to SD cards, which extends their life.

Things like that are easy enough to set up on Raspbian with a script. You also need a bunch of tmpfs mounts, including some in crazy places(Regular Pi has a log file under ~/.cache that can fill disks and crash servers, and if you don't fix it Chromium writes seemingly useless crap constantly. There's auto updates on some systems, which is terrible if you're on a private WiFi, not doing internet stuff.

I'm not using zram at the moment, just getting rid of swap, but my current script to get a Pi ready for embedded projects is here: https://github.com/EternityForest/KaithemAutomation/blob/mas...

Armbian is such a great project, it's really nice to see it get more wide use and recognition.

This doesn’t seem to have happened at a scale that would trouble the Raspberry Pi Trading Company.

What has happened, I think, is that applications that only ever needed a few hundred lines of python and a few GPIO pins have happily moved to the Pico/Pico W.

But I suspect the poor OS support and terrible documentation of most competing boards means that the clone SMBs will only have made a small dent in their business.

Not that a little market diversification is a bad thing. Any competitor that can match the broad software support and documentation of the Pi boards is obviously going to be welcome.

Mind you there must have been a cost to the zeitgeist/mindshare aspect of SBCs generally; the Raspberry Pi products weren’t the only ones to become hard to find at truly low prices. The Foundation did a great job with the Pico which I would argue meets their educational goals better than say the Pi 4B, but maybe the role of the SBCs in education is forever diminished.

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