I'm talking about the foundation's total picture, obviously.

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)

The Pi is a lot less "weird" than a lot of the hardware the mainline kernel does support

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 later ARM64 Raspberry Pi hardware is more standard, and you definitely can get most of the hardware working with a mainline Linux kernel. It looks like sound may be an outlier - but bcm2835_audio is in staging, and I2S is in the tree proper but that does require additional hardware.

>I wanted to use Rpi 2B as a networked sound card for a room.

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.

I built a moderately successful audio project around it. We've got a few hundred Pi's as audio player appliances for our streaming platform in a hospitality niche in my country.

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).

Sure, but how many Orange Pi-like sbc's bother to advertise mainline kernel compatibility? That matters too if you want ease of support. The Raspberry Pi folks have a long history of working with the kernel dev community; their support is not just hacked together after-the-fact.

Weird question. Do you want an actual count?

> Weird question.

Rhetorical question, I think.