For their time (20 years ago), they certainly were cheap. $100 or so for a small power efficient box that could run almost a whole Linux distribution was an amazing bargain. Before that, you needed a good-sized desktop or server to do anything involving a Unix-like OS, or paid dearly for the convenience of a laptop.
And it wasn't much before that, that running Unix on any microcomputer was just a dream.
It's hard to comprend just how amazingly affordable computing has become in such a short amount of time.
I remember that time in my life very well. I literally had around $50 in my local currency in the coin box, and that was it. Hand me down computers were unavailable where I was.
Yes, it reached a wide audience, they did a lot of great stuff getting capable dev boards out to a lot of people. But fully functional Linux on ARM pre-dates the Pi significantly.
(I’d argue the NSLU2 and sheevaplug were both pretty affordable, at sub-$100 too, but the Pi definitely upped the game there)
It is my contention that this support was largely already present. That's all.
Pi did great work getting cheap boards out to people, and put a lot of effort into education and community building. They exposed a huge number of people to the possibilities of non-x86 computing that otherwise might not have been. So indeed let's credit them with that, it's all great stuff!
But it's quite revisionist to say they helped get linux or BSD or their tools onto the platform, IMHO.
If Pi3 was so popular, why didn't it exist as a binary?
Beyond that, I can only hypothesize that Docker on non-x86_64 (or multiarch Docker, in general), was very difficult to kick-start for whatever reason. This may have been compounded by the fact that Docker wasn't as broadly adopted by hobbyists back then, so demand for ARM builds want that great.
Getting more attention to the platform was definitely a good thing, exposing more people to a different architecture, to having a machine cheap enough to just play with, to all sorts of great stuff.
But Linux and BSD themselves were already mature on arm by that point.
Whoa, haven't heard that one in a looong time. Still have mine sitting in a storage closet, I think...
I used to run my own mail server on one and use another as a media server. I even did a small hardware mod and soldered a wifi card to one of the internal USB headers on one of them. Much fun!
I don't imagine the processing power stands up to modern devices though :)
It was pioneering in how low-cost and mass market it was at launch, but before the Pi there was plug computing, largely based around Marvell Kirkwood processors. There were also a variety of hackable NAS devices, I used some with Orion5x CPUS in. Then before plug computing there was the linksys NSLU2 with its Intel Xscale IXP chip, and all the hackable linksys routers going back to 2002, and that's just some of the stuff I've played with over the years. Before that I imagine there were previous generations of linux ARM support.
The Pi and other hobby boards are really great, don't get me wrong, but there's a tendency to credit them with a bit too much.