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Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

What is conveniently overlooked in these neverending^1 HN comments that dismiss RPi as "inferior" is that (a) RPi is a brand, (b) people are familiar with and trust the brand and (c) when everyone is doing their projects on the same hardware it avoids compatibility disclaimers like "This is project is tested on X. It may or may not work on Y." It obviates consideration of "hardware compatibility". With the RPi people know exactly what hardware to buy. Even if the hardware is overpriced or underpowered, synergies are created when everyone is using the same hardware. IMHO, one cannot discount the value of that, but these comments downgrading the RPi aways do. Of course there are better choices for hardware than the RPi, and perhaps without the supply issues, but good luck getting everyone to buy the same thing so that projects do not have to account for "hardware compatibilty".

1. Eleven years and counting

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I love these things:

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804116114245.html

There are a few suppliers, but the 4x Intel NICs open up lots of possibilities. They're very lower power, but still fast enough to handle a lot of traffic.

I run VMWare ESXi on mine and use openwrt for my router on two ports and then a general purpose server in another VM.

I have a couple of N5105 boxes I got off of Amazon on sale, but I haven't put them into use, yet.

I've never bought off of AliExpress. I'm in the U.S. Do people take precautions when ordering from them? I'm not so worried about the products, themselves. I'm worried about the use and security of my financial data.

Worried as in, I just don't know whether they are safe stewards. No experience, no one to ask. Except maybe you guys. Give them my credit card #? Generate a one time #? PayPal?

Sorry to go a bit OT, but this is yet again where I've been tempted to order from them.

I buy from AliExpress often. Most recently a batch of anodized metal business cards, before that a bunch of home automation sensors. I could get the same sensor from Amazon for a lot more money, I did get one for a test piece before buying 16 of them.

My experience has always been a good one. Just be prepared to wait a while for delivery, the business cards were about three weeks.

Just use a 1 time card and reinstall the OS.

Why stop at reinstalling the OS? You also need to throw away the PC in the dumpster of another neighborhood or city and at least use an angle grinder on the NIC and SSD. Don't forget to wipe off the fingerprints beforehand.

No, that's excessive. I always just unsolder and replace every component, but I thought that went without saying.

Wgat about the firmware? Stuff like Intel ME.

It's more that all the instructions you'll find assume raspberry pi os as it is the hardware. If there was more diversity of OS in everyday use you might see more fragmentation.

One of the other aspects of the RPi I think deserves more credit is the ability to easily boot into a variety of OS. Ideally I prefer to boot from USB or the network, but SDCard is still better than nothing. For some strange reason people try to use an SDCard in r/w mode after boot, treatng it like primary storage. IME, that is a recipe for failure. I prefer to boot to RAM. Then I might mount external storage device if I need it, but certainly not an SDCard.

Now, maybe the setup I choose is more difficult on one OS than on another. This is where RPi shines, IMO. As a project creator, I can use an OS I choose from among a variety that have been ported to the RPi, including non-popular ones, and I know every RPi user can easily run it because it's been already been pre-installed on SDCard; the RPi is not OS-specific. No pre-installtion of OS! (This pre-installation practice enabled Microsoft to stifle competition and hold back progress in computing for decades.)

Prior to RPi, many SBC only had GNU/Linux as an OS choice because that's what's popular. For example, prior to the RPi port running Plan9 required careful hardware purchasing choices. Choosing RPi, a well-known brand, is arguably much easier.

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