Total picture is that I can't still run mainline Linux on Rapsberry Pi 2B without losing a bunch of basic features, while I can run it on almost all my Orange Pis. This makes Raspberry Pi very annoying to use. I wanted to use Rpi 2B as a networked sound card for a room. Nope. No audio support mainline after like 7 years after release.
The Pi isn't mainstream hardware, is it?
Their total picture includes OS distribution and support that eclipses all the other mini-SBC-type ARM machines.
Ubuntu has a mainstream distribution supported by the Pi Imager, and it should support sound, if you have the right boot parameters set?
(edit: not sure this supports as far back as the 2B; I might have to test that)
Wanna run Linux on a Sega Dreamcast? (game console from 1998)
Well there's a dreamcast_defconfig in the mainline kernel still
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/sh/config...
How about a Nintendo 64 from 1996? Someone sat down and hacked that out too!
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mips/20201225190503.1235321881...
Or for more recent examples. How about some ancient routers?
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5....
These are bits of hardware added by hobbyists or small teams. The Raspberry Pi foundation is a company with paid developers supporting a set of devices you could count on one hand (or two if you include every variant separately)
The analog sound output is a hack through 10bit pwm. It's better than nothing, but I wouldn't recommend building an audio related project around it.
Yeah, Pi audio card leaves a lot to be desired, but mostly the power level of the output. The signal quality can be worked around somewhat with processing the audio beforehand (standard compression and EQ stuff, so that the signal doesn't need something that the card can't do).
However, there are sound cards you can put on top of Pi, such as https://www.hifiberry.com (which we use), without breaking the budget, and they sound great.
Edit to add: what I love about Pis is how reliable they are. We literally treat them as appliances and they end up in places that are really not optimial from either ventilation, dust or temperature aspect, and they very rarely break. Even SD cards are not as fragile as we've initially feared (we've minimized write cycles but there is some of that).
Rhetorical question, I think.
Right -- it had potential but it also had problems they were seemingly unwilling to fix.
> Pine64, BananaPi, Orange Pi, Radxa, et all often make some pretty decent hardware, but the fact that it's often as hard today to get my projects working on those boards as it was with all SBCs back in 2012-2014 means I still stick to Raspberry Pi-branded boards for most things.
This is something the Raspberry Pi Foundation people will stress when people snark in comments about specs when they launch a new machine. The total picture matters much more than specific, minor, things.
Even when it comes down to something like pi-gen, which is obscure but enormously useful for tinkering with distribution builders. Or the Raspberry Pi Imager app for desktops.
Eben Upton credits Eric Schmidt with providing the motivation to make computers even cheaper, rather than pursuing better and better Raspberry Pi machines, and in the grand scheme of things it's hard to ignore that Raspberry Pi is better when they do focus on choosing their own constraints with stuff like the 2040 and the Pi Zero 2W.