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Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

But it does matter if you're using a Pi or an old laptop. I mean, those two are just radically different, but even for fairly comparable platforms you often end up having to do adjust procedures, you can't just blindly follow a how-to.

For a newbie, those subtle adjustments are often the difference between wifi working and not working. An experienced user will figure it out, but it can take forever.

The RPi isn't the cheapest or the fastest or the smallest or the most featurific board in its niche. But it's got great value as a standard platform, which means if you've got a problem, chances are someone else had it before and maybe wrote up a solution.

Of course it all breaks down once you start using external hardware, which I found out when I tried to get my USB wifi stick running (unsuccessfully). But at least you can google "raspberry pi <manufacturer> <model>" and get advice specific to you.

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I'm not sure it matters more that you're using a Pi than it would matter which old laptop you're using.

And, when it's as low-level as simply making something work, rather than particularly optimising it (when the fact that it's a Pi or a 2003 T61 or a whatever do matter), I think that treating it as a slow Debian machine and finding a generic howto (or, better, a few generic howtos) is much more appropriate than insisting that you find a "How to install postfix and courier on as raspberry pi".

Obviously for troubleshooting problems the hardware's much more important, too, but so far I've just treated my Pi as just another Debian box and everything's just working.

You didn't really add any arguments -- why doesn't it matter, why is it not imortant? I think specific how-tos are useful, regardless of whether it's about making things work or making them fast, because there are often countless things that could conceivably go wrong, and a specific how-to can be as succinct as possible for a given set of circumstances.

If I just want to mess around with a platform, I might not care about that, and I might prefer to read a dozen more abstract how-tos and guides to get in-depth knowledge about a topic. But usually, I don't want to be troubleshooting (or optimising) Wifi USB hardware, and it absolutely does matter whether you're using a RPi or an old laptop, in fact it matters whether you're using a Rev. A or a Rev B RPi. A generic guide to installing node.js on the RPi would have been much less straightforward than the specific one I had available.

And the difference is way more pronounced when you're trying to get intrepid newbies interested in your platform.

The newbies are the reason. They need to know what the word is they need to search for, or they may not realize the full power they have for them, which is putatively the point of the RPis.

Personally I am also perturbed in that it contributes to the growing culture of seeing devices as something other than general-purpose computing machines, and I really fear the political implications of a growing misconception about the nature of these computers. What bothers me even more than these RPi tutorials are "Pedestrian Computer Application X Run On A Mobile Phone! Wowzers!" stories, some of which even make it onto HN (though not so much lately). Yes, you got your general purpose computer to run a program. This shouldn't be surprising, this should be the expected outcome, the news should be that you find yourself unable to run whatever program you like on these general-purpose computing devices.

RPis are computers. Cell phones are computers. The cheapest, crappiest feature phone currently being sold has specs that blow every computer I owned before 1990 out of the water. This is important for as many people as possible to understand, lest we blunder into walled gardens for no good reason.

Well, it's not important because the difference, generally, between the Pi and a random computer is similar to that which can be expected between any other two random computers.

The thing with the newbies I get - they want to google "web server raspberry pi" and get a really quick and easy step-by-step, but I'd really like them to at some point get the idea that this is a general purpose programmable computer like their laptop, PC, phone, whatever, and that they should expect it to be able to do basically anything.

I get the benefit of the specific howto, but I've not yet found enough pi-specific problems to make me think that's more important than getting the idea that it's a proper computer and not just some cut-down thing that can only do a good enough impression of one to run a web server and python or whatever.

can you suggest some alternatives to the pi?

The new Cubieboard recently hit HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4696965

Here's a list of other alternatives (caveat emptor): http://www.redferret.net/?p=33596

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