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Double Standards

raspberrypi.com

119 points_Microft45 comments

This is strange. The Pi5 seems to want a cooling fan pretty badly, and any HAT is going to completely block the airflow if it even leaves room for the fan. Are people using HATs finding problems with cooling?

I asked about that and never got a response. My thought would be some sort of side/end fed cooling fan instead of one that exhausts out the top.

I lost interest in raspberry pi once I saw that it's $80 + $20 case + $30 SD card + $10 PSU = $140.... which is more expensive than a new n100 alder lake mini-pc.

I thought the same thing but you are not comparing apples and apples.

If you say just price I would say pi ~$120, vs alder lake ~$190

But the most important thing the pi has is mindshare.

It is not better hardware-wise (beaglebone, banana pi, etc)

It is not better at general purpose computing or a nas or a desktop (any intel or amd machine is better)

But it is good education. You don't have to "install" linux, just put the sd card in and go.

You can learn hardware things. You can learn linux things. You have lots of company. Many people are using it at the hobby level (several million). Someone has done it and made a web page or youtube video.

This is honestly the thing that annoys me most about Raspberry Pis. They’ve taken what was (and still is) transferable knowledge on how to do things with Linux and made people think it’s some sort of Raspberry Pi magic.

The shear number of “how to run Nginx on a Raspberry Pi 4” tutorials blows my mind. Why not teach people to fish instead and show them how to apply the same process you would for any other Linux distribution? Who knows, maybe that’s a thing I should do.

I share your frustration but part of this has to be incremental to get people on-boarded and interested. Most people will search for Raspberry Pi, not Linux. Now, will those tutorials point out at the end, “Hey, this applies to most Linux distros, click here to learn more.”? Would be nice but probably not.

Also, in my old age and as a parent, I also search for the same. And I’m the kid that installed Slackware from floppies at 11. Could I figure out which commands to write into the current Debian distribution that Raspberry Pi uses? Definitely. But I have limited focus time with my kids. I’d love for him to learn the basics too, but that will come. At 5, I just need to wow him with all the cool things he can build. The details can come later.

That may be the title of the article for SEO purposes. But anyone who learns how to install nginx on raspberry pi will soon find out that their knowledge transfers to most Linux distro.

Most people don't want to learn to fish in their quest to make a seafood dinner.

Isn't it the job of Nginx to provide a distro-neutral installation document?

Note that the Pi 5 is $60 (4GB), the case is $10, a good microSD card is $10, and the PSU is $12. So total to get into the Pi 5 game is $92, not $140. All of those things besides the Pi 5 itself right now are in stock at my local computer store, so no shipping either ;)

And Pi 4 is a perfectly reasonable computer for many, many use cases still, and is available practically everywhere again.

> new n100 alder lake mini-pc.

I was curious

https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Lake-N100-Desktop-Computer-Et...

$199.00 shipped Prime

What does the performance of this CPU compare to Raspberry Pi 5 CPU?

500GB SSD + 16GB of RAM blows it out of the water, obviously...

Not sure how much of an advantage being amd64 vs aarch64/arm64 is these days but still worth calling out

And no pinouts on the n100 mini-pc. Not to mention the software ecosystem that is prepped and ready to go for the many special use cases of raspberry pis. At least the n100 is low power. Not as low as rapi, but not nearly as bad of a tradeoff as other, older mini PC options.

> no pinouts

If I needed them I'd consider adding a cheap ($6.50 on adafruit) USB to GPIO adapter (or a USB Arduino or rPi pico board.)

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

$14.95 before shipping and you have to solder the pins

Even better, if one n100 is out of stock, you can buy one from a different vendor and it will work fine. Good luck running your raspberry image on an orange pi.

The n100 will have a cooling solution so you can run it full speed forever. (As I do with both my N100s). edit: both mine have NVME disk connectors. I just swapped a crappy M2 SATA for a second hand NVME and it's about 2X the speed.

I've been excited about the possibility of having computational power around my home. A Pi would enable this, but so would a central computer connected to several thin clients, or even just NAS access, both of which being cheaper options. The Pi is pretty cool, but I'm finding less uses for it personally. It's still a nice device for embedded applications

PI is meant for embedded projects, like making a robot, where you need the camera input, the high-speed GPIO, the small power consumption and the formfactor.

If you just want a small 'normal' computer, that's not the point of pi

I love Pi, but I agree with you. I recently purchased some mini-pcs, i5-9th, 32gb, cheaply upped to 64... all off ebay for under $175, hard to argue... its only like 3-5sq inches larger too.

Can I stick a 4090 to it?

I know it's a terrible idea, and I can't afford the mortgage, but can I?

I certainly will try it, once we get AMD drivers to a happier place. Unfortunately, Nvidia's proprietary drivers are not ideal for community debugging, and Nouveau is a little rough on arm64.

The current answer is maybe: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss...

The PCIe implementation on the 5 is supposedly more complete/less broken than on the CM4, but so far the only person crazy/inspired enough to test hasn't gotten back to this card with their Pi 5 setup.

No: The RPi5 has 4x lanes, the 4090 requires 16x lanes of PCI3.0

No, it doesn't require it. It's desired to fully utilized it, but not required.

PCIe is fully backward and forward compatible between versions. Many eGPUs run at PCIE 3.0 4x.

Does it require 16x?

Previous-gen video cards were often connected to risers that only provided 1x, and lots of "normal" systems (with a bit of expansion) don't have enough PCI Express lanes to give 16 lanes to any one device.

> the 4090 requires 16x lanes of PCI3.0

Does it require 16x PCI-E 3 just to run? Or is that just a minimum to get the most performance?

RPi5 exposes 1 lane on the PCIe connector. It routes 4 lanes to the 2040 chip that provides much of the board's I/O.

IMO 1 lane is better than none. I love the CM4 because it exposes 1 PCIe lane and that can support a NVME SSD making it the first Pi that supports what I consider to be a decent storage interface.

No: it does not

I get the feeling that by the time I've paid for that and the hat I could probably have bagged a Lenovo mini PC...

You can get entire PCs way more powerful than any generation of Pi, with more connectivity/port options, for roughly the price of a pi + case, on eBay. It’s long been true that if you don’t need or want some of the particular characteristics or features of a Pi (compact size + GPIO, say), they’re not a great purchase.

This is true is all you need is a cheap compute box. RPis give GPIO pins, compact size, and relatively low power usage. If you want something comparable, maybe an old mobile phone + a USB GPIO breakout board would fit the bill better.

It's not the same buying a new product from official supplier, to buying something old and/or used from an unknown entity on eBay.

Certified refurbishers usually sell fine machines, and give a year of guarantee, or so.

You can get a new Lenovo mini PC with these features for the price of a new Raspberry Pi 5 and its accoutrements?

As others have said, ebay. One thing that helps is looking for "thin clients" - I know the Dell Wyse (not Lenovo obviously, but an example) can be "unlocked" to install normal Linux fairly easily. First page of results has options for under $30USD with free shipping (probably US only, but still).

Don't get me wrong: I've got a cheap (~$50 USD, delivered) Lenovo M600 here that I like just fine. It's a dandy little PC that does all kinds of normal PC stuff without any hacks required at all. (It runs Home Assistant rather well in a virtualized environment, and that's exactly what I bought it for.)

But there's a lot of things I can do with a Raspberry Pi [5] that I can't do with the M600.

Some examples off the top of my head:

I can't do hardware tinkering with it, like plug in a DS18B20 temperature sensor or blink an LED (or a video wall worth of WS2812s), due to lack of accessible GPIO. There's huge swaths of interesting projects that this lack of GPIO cuts out completely. (I'm thus also not particularly interested in using an M600 as a Klipper host for my custom 3D printing rig.)

I can't attach random PCIe devices to the M600 (as far as I know) to do things like run Stable Diffusion or run a small storage array (homebrew NAS!) due to the lack of an accessible PCIe interface.

The package is small by x86 PC standards, but it enormous by Raspberry Pi standards. Consequently, I'm not taking an M600 with me in my backpack to a hotel to tinker with when I'm out of town for work (whereas I barely notice a Pi in my backpack).

And the M600 is frankly pretty boring. Raspberry Pi devices are fun to goof around with, whereas dealing with the M600 feels exactly like dealing with my desktop PC feels (only slower). Having fun with computers is very important to me, and learning-oriented SBCs are a lot more fun than stodgy corpo off-lease "thin client" PCs are.

And speaking of off-lease: The M600 was already well-used when I got it. It showed up in good condition and I think it represented a good value at the time that I bought it, but newness matters.

It -especially- matters in a price comparison.

I would not recommend a thin client. They are very underpowered as they are designed to essentially boot to RDP and nothing else. Much better off with a mini as they are "real" desktops computers.

alder lake n100 mini-pc on amazon is $120. It has 8x the CPU perf plus normal OS for same power

ebay...

I thought this was going to be about the double standard of how they treat business vs non-business end users, but they are releasing two new standards

A new hat and the new hat specification it follows

> I thought this was going to be about the double standard of how they treat business vs non-business end users

While Raspberry Pi were marketed to hobbyists, other parts of the organization are geared towards businesses. After all, what hobbyists would look for 7-year production guarantee?

Which is also good for hobbyists.

I like a stable toolbox for my hobby projects. They usually take far longer than expected and it’s quite annoying to find out that the only way to replace a broken part is with a new version that requires a new tool chain and produces lots of mysterious error messages.

They are geared towards education, in which they do want to not have to switch out products so quickly.

Think I’m giving this gen a miss entirely.

Orange pi 5plus is more expensive but - better cpu, 32gb vs 8, 2.5 lan and built in m.2

Especially on men that’s one hell of a difference.

I mean, that's nice. Great they finally got around to it. Meanwhile, Pineberry Pi has actually shipped the 'HatDrive! Bottom' M.2 NVMe board for the Pi5 that I ordered a few weeks ago. So while the folks in England are still faffing around with releasing spec sheets, I'll be using my system, and using a board that doesn't block the active cooling setup since it mounts underneath. https://pineberrypi.com/products/hatdrive-bottom-2230-2242-2...

(Unaffiliated: just a paying customer)

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