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Comment by _fizz_buzz_ | Hacker News Reader

I think their point was more: is an ESP32 more like a arduino (or any other MCU) running bare metal or some thine RTOS or more like a raspberry pi which is more like a mini computer running a full fledged Linux. And I guess the answer it kind of always sat in between a little bit and now the family kind of spreads out across this whole spectrum.

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To date ESP32s have been best thought of as arduino-like things, albeit with some fancy hardware available like WiFi and Bluetooth stacks. But very much microcontroller boards where you compile firmware and push it to the board over USB.

You can actually do an awful lot of stuff with an ESP32, which often comes as a surprise to people who think you need a full Linux system just to turn a light on and off. For example Goodwe solar inverters/controllers are controlled by ESP32s and do a great job while Enphase controllers use Linux SBCs and are flaky, bug-riddled garbage.

People still have no idea that ESP32 is much better than most MS-DOS PCs we had at the time, no need for Linux.

Arduino have muddied this water now, too, as some newer ones come with a full fledged Qualcomm SOC, multiple GB of RAM, and power consumption which requires quite a beefy heatsink.

> is an ESP32 more like a arduino (or any other MCU) running bare metal or some thine RTOS or more like a raspberry pi which is more like a mini computer running a full fledged Linux

Espressif's answer: yes

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