It's been uncanny how much being publicly traded heralds the start of a company's enshittification... I consider myself a glass-half-full kind of person, so here's to hoping Raspberry Pi is the...
It's been uncanny how much being publicly traded heralds the start of a company's enshittification...
I consider myself a glass-half-full kind of person, so here's to hoping Raspberry Pi is the cherry exception to the shit-cake...
IMO it’s selection bias. The type of company that goes public is the type of company with big ambitions. There’s nothing inherent about going public that means anything other than more stringent...
IMO it’s selection bias. The type of company that goes public is the type of company with big ambitions. There’s nothing inherent about going public that means anything other than more stringent reporting to the government and the public about your finances.
The type of company that goes public is the type of company that wants another funding source. There's plenty of ambitious private companies. The ( potential ) problem is the focus shifting from...
The type of company that goes public is the type of company that wants another funding source. There's plenty of ambitious private companies.
The ( potential ) problem is the focus shifting from providing a good product/service to making more profit. Those aren't opposing directions, but they do diverge.
"increasing shareholder value" Which ostensibly is by making more profit by providing a good product and good customer service. But in reality is all too easily warped into something that pays lip...
shifting from providing a good product/service to making more profit
"increasing shareholder value"
Which ostensibly is by making more profit by providing a good product and good customer service. But in reality is all too easily warped into something that pays lip service to those things while playing a PR game that makes people excited to buy more stock.
Sure, but that's what I mean; that's the actual correlation. I'm sure many ambitious private companies do what netizens could call "enshittification". And there's many non-ambitious private...
There's plenty of ambitious private companies.
Sure, but that's what I mean; that's the actual correlation. I'm sure many ambitious private companies do what netizens could call "enshittification".
And there's many non-ambitious private companies that are content to take their revenue and just keep the product up. But if you're in the latter, what's the point in going public? It's no fun writing up a lot of documents to send the government if you don't have to.
There is difference between doing it for money and doing it for people. They did great for people ever since, let's hope they continue on this way. But going public likely means shifting to doing...
There is difference between doing it for money and doing it for people. They did great for people ever since, let's hope they continue on this way. But going public likely means shifting to doing it for money so that shareholders don't complain...
I kinda like Linus' (Linus Tech Tips) view on this when he invested in Framework (they make notebooks the best way I've seen so far, and especially in last few years). He basically written off the money, he didn't do it to get more but because he believed in Framework's mission and wanted to help them in the beginning by "giving" them money. Yes, he holds some shares of Framework, but it's not why he did it. We can only hope that RPi will have such investors and not the greedy ones.
I wouldn't, sadly. Texas instruments is a mess thanks to COVID and lack of vision, official OS builds ended sometime in 2023 due to the sole dev going dark, and the software stack for beaglebones...
I wouldn't, sadly.
Texas instruments is a mess thanks to COVID and lack of vision, official OS builds ended sometime in 2023 due to the sole dev going dark, and the software stack for beaglebones is very opinionated and difficult to work with. I won 4 beaglebone greens in a contest a while back and trying to use them for various things like docker, pihole adblocking, or 3D printer webUIs each posed different complications or performance issues that I ended up abandoning the project.
Luckily there are many single board computers out there and a great website for searching them all https://hackerboards.com/
Beaglebone was honestly never really that good to begin with. I bought the first version and it quickly became ewaste as it was replaced with a version with more storage almost immediately and the...
Beaglebone was honestly never really that good to begin with. I bought the first version and it quickly became ewaste as it was replaced with a version with more storage almost immediately and the old one was too small to hold the newer operating system image. The very brief time I was able to get it to run anything it was extremely slow, buggy, and prone to crashing. At about the same time I had this small Internet appliance I got for free that was on paper worse in every way that mattered and had zero support for it but it still worked much better.
I can second that. I used Beaglebone Blacks extensively because the double PRUs were fantastic for our purpose, but sadly the move to remoteproc CPU messaging was not done in the best of ways, and...
I can second that. I used Beaglebone Blacks extensively because the double PRUs were fantastic for our purpose, but sadly the move to remoteproc CPU messaging was not done in the best of ways, and as you say, support is limited at best.
Our move to Debian 10 was plagued with a ton of issues, and although I could squeeze out a bit more performance, it was difficult to justify the effort.
It's a shame, because I adored working with the Beaglebone AI as I could effectively use one of the CPU cores as a RT processing unit, leave the other one for OS tasks, and pass down all the actual RT work to the 4x PRUs on it.
Right now, as a hobbyist, I'm enjoying working with a Pico, as its PIO is similar to the PRUs in a sense, and the dual core capabilities are more than enough for most people.
So is this going to kill Raspberry Pi as a quality product? I've been leaning into them pretty heavily over the last few years, but I'm not opposed to choosing other SBCs.
So is this going to kill Raspberry Pi as a quality product? I've been leaning into them pretty heavily over the last few years, but I'm not opposed to choosing other SBCs.
It is unlikely that they are going to go off a cliff in quality immediately. I assume it will be a slow burn of slight quality decreases to save on cost over the course of years.
It is unlikely that they are going to go off a cliff in quality immediately. I assume it will be a slow burn of slight quality decreases to save on cost over the course of years.
And putting out new products every so often no matter how good or useful or desirable they are. Instead of new RPi every few years, we will get incremental increases or million of veraions of the...
And putting out new products every so often no matter how good or useful or desirable they are. Instead of new RPi every few years, we will get incremental increases or million of veraions of the same board which will cost them money that won't eventually go into research or building just one new quality product...
I've already seen a lot of issues for them just from the mini PC space, where you can get a product that's similarly priced and much more likely to do what you want for a lot of the use cases. If...
I've already seen a lot of issues for them just from the mini PC space, where you can get a product that's similarly priced and much more likely to do what you want for a lot of the use cases.
If you need a board for some mechanical project I think they're still a viable choice, but all the "mini server" operations are getting heavily encroached on by the miniforums/nuk/whatever crowd.
I've always took RPi as tinkerer's toy or client of some sort (ie. Kodi on my dumb old TV) or kinda smarter/powerful IoT device (or IoT hub of sorts). In these specs there's not that much better...
I've always took RPi as tinkerer's toy or client of some sort (ie. Kodi on my dumb old TV) or kinda smarter/powerful IoT device (or IoT hub of sorts). In these specs there's not that much better options.
But if you want fileserver or more powerful kinda HTPC or more connectivity etc., there certainly are better options.
RPi's strength is in OS IMHO. It just works while on other similar boards you might have trouble getting something to work right - I mean HW acceleration/decoding, getting sensors runnung correctly, finding (pin/header) compatible boards... Sometimes maybe even just booting up. Or having your OS updated in the future. RPi kinda shines in this regard. Or it did so far...
It's been uncanny how much being publicly traded heralds the start of a company's enshittification...
I consider myself a glass-half-full kind of person, so here's to hoping Raspberry Pi is the cherry exception to the shit-cake...
IMO it’s selection bias. The type of company that goes public is the type of company with big ambitions. There’s nothing inherent about going public that means anything other than more stringent reporting to the government and the public about your finances.
The type of company that goes public is the type of company that wants another funding source. There's plenty of ambitious private companies.
The ( potential ) problem is the focus shifting from providing a good product/service to making more profit. Those aren't opposing directions, but they do diverge.
"increasing shareholder value"
Which ostensibly is by making more profit by providing a good product and good customer service. But in reality is all too easily warped into something that pays lip service to those things while playing a PR game that makes people excited to buy more stock.
Sure, but that's what I mean; that's the actual correlation. I'm sure many ambitious private companies do what netizens could call "enshittification".
And there's many non-ambitious private companies that are content to take their revenue and just keep the product up. But if you're in the latter, what's the point in going public? It's no fun writing up a lot of documents to send the government if you don't have to.
There is difference between doing it for money and doing it for people. They did great for people ever since, let's hope they continue on this way. But going public likely means shifting to doing it for money so that shareholders don't complain...
I kinda like Linus' (Linus Tech Tips) view on this when he invested in Framework (they make notebooks the best way I've seen so far, and especially in last few years). He basically written off the money, he didn't do it to get more but because he believed in Framework's mission and wanted to help them in the beginning by "giving" them money. Yes, he holds some shares of Framework, but it's not why he did it. We can only hope that RPi will have such investors and not the greedy ones.
Well, I suppose now is as good as ever to start learning about the beaglebone - I ran into it first around 2017, but I’ve never actually bought one.
I wouldn't, sadly.
Texas instruments is a mess thanks to COVID and lack of vision, official OS builds ended sometime in 2023 due to the sole dev going dark, and the software stack for beaglebones is very opinionated and difficult to work with. I won 4 beaglebone greens in a contest a while back and trying to use them for various things like docker, pihole adblocking, or 3D printer webUIs each posed different complications or performance issues that I ended up abandoning the project.
Luckily there are many single board computers out there and a great website for searching them all https://hackerboards.com/
Beaglebone was honestly never really that good to begin with. I bought the first version and it quickly became ewaste as it was replaced with a version with more storage almost immediately and the old one was too small to hold the newer operating system image. The very brief time I was able to get it to run anything it was extremely slow, buggy, and prone to crashing. At about the same time I had this small Internet appliance I got for free that was on paper worse in every way that mattered and had zero support for it but it still worked much better.
That’s a wonderful link! Thank you for the resource!
I can second that. I used Beaglebone Blacks extensively because the double PRUs were fantastic for our purpose, but sadly the move to remoteproc CPU messaging was not done in the best of ways, and as you say, support is limited at best.
Our move to Debian 10 was plagued with a ton of issues, and although I could squeeze out a bit more performance, it was difficult to justify the effort.
It's a shame, because I adored working with the Beaglebone AI as I could effectively use one of the CPU cores as a RT processing unit, leave the other one for OS tasks, and pass down all the actual RT work to the 4x PRUs on it.
Right now, as a hobbyist, I'm enjoying working with a Pico, as its PIO is similar to the PRUs in a sense, and the dual core capabilities are more than enough for most people.
So is this going to kill Raspberry Pi as a quality product? I've been leaning into them pretty heavily over the last few years, but I'm not opposed to choosing other SBCs.
It is unlikely that they are going to go off a cliff in quality immediately. I assume it will be a slow burn of slight quality decreases to save on cost over the course of years.
And putting out new products every so often no matter how good or useful or desirable they are. Instead of new RPi every few years, we will get incremental increases or million of veraions of the same board which will cost them money that won't eventually go into research or building just one new quality product...
I've already seen a lot of issues for them just from the mini PC space, where you can get a product that's similarly priced and much more likely to do what you want for a lot of the use cases.
If you need a board for some mechanical project I think they're still a viable choice, but all the "mini server" operations are getting heavily encroached on by the miniforums/nuk/whatever crowd.
I've always took RPi as tinkerer's toy or client of some sort (ie. Kodi on my dumb old TV) or kinda smarter/powerful IoT device (or IoT hub of sorts). In these specs there's not that much better options.
But if you want fileserver or more powerful kinda HTPC or more connectivity etc., there certainly are better options.
RPi's strength is in OS IMHO. It just works while on other similar boards you might have trouble getting something to work right - I mean HW acceleration/decoding, getting sensors runnung correctly, finding (pin/header) compatible boards... Sometimes maybe even just booting up. Or having your OS updated in the future. RPi kinda shines in this regard. Or it did so far...
I always see these as a death sentence for a company, so.. RIP. They had a good run!