In terms of what? Battery usage at idle? BOM to operationalize the design? Surely not.
> > It's almost as if most of the people whining are just upset there isn't a cheap device they can drop into a Kodi box without any effort.
> Okay. Yes? That's a valid usecase.
Funny enough, all throughout the pandemic the one thing that kept being made was Android streaming boxes. I'm pretty sure it's dead simple to wipe those and put Kodi on them. So it's not much of a valid use-case. (I'd instead expect most hobbyists who want Pis, to actually want them for running game-console emulators — specifically, emulators for consoles new enough that those weaker streaming boxes would struggle with them.)
>> One of the main options pointed at is low-power x86 boxes, which are better than Pis ever were. The rest of the ARM ecosystem is, I agree, poor.
> In terms of what? Battery usage at idle? BOM to operationalize the design? Surely not.
I was responding to kernel support; x86 boxes can usually just run straight mainline Linux with no problem, which is far better than most of the ARM ecosystem (even Pis aren't running mainline, they're just a well-supported downstream).
> Android streaming boxes. I'm pretty sure it's dead simple to wipe those and put Kodi on them
There are alternatives, but then we're back to spotty support, fragmented ecosystems, and using a Pi for video streaming is still a valid usecase.
There being a shortage in the US isn't exactly relevant to most of the world.
One of the main options pointed at is low-power x86 boxes, which are better than Pis ever were. The rest of the ARM ecosystem is, I agree, poor.
> - people (often Americans) saying that the Pi has been "supply-constrained for five years". It really hasn't; it wasn't particularly supply-constrained in the UK until about five or six months into the pandemic.
Then it really has; there being a supply in the UK isn't exactly useful to most of the world.
> What I don't understand is this: how is it, if you've not been able to get hold of something for _five_ years, there's been no obvious co-ordinated attempts to get mainline support for the alternatives, or even any attempt to match the documentation? Five years was plenty of time to pick a single series of devices and match the same level of kernel support, surely? Couldn't it have been crowdfunded?
Partially, nobody was expecting it to actually take that long. If at the start of the shortage we'd known it was going to be 5 years, there probably would have been more of a push. OTOH some of the alternatives have been getting more polished.
> It's almost as if most of the people whining are just upset there isn't a cheap device they can drop into a Kodi box without any effort.
Okay. Yes? That's a valid usecase.