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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

I’m going to argue there’s no difference in “ecosystem” between arm and x86 anymore. It’s as simple as compiling with a flag. Your frustrations are your own.

I will give you the extra cost of the accessories and plugs you need just to get a raspberry pi up and running.

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Currently with the latest pi os version, moonlight streaming's video hardware support doesn't work.

While it's the the fault of the moonlight devs (also you can compile it yourself to get it working), the binary package version has been broken for 2+ months now.

If I was using archlinux on x86 I wouldn't have problems like this.

Stale packages are a distro problem, not a platform one. You said so yourself, you can compile it and it works. Your problem isn’t with ARM. Arch on arm works fine.

While not ARMs fault, the pain is still very real for the end user. Compiling once is maybe ok, if you get lucky. But more often than not you end up needing to compile several things, and then again every time there is an update you want. Trying to automatic that is also a pain.

It's just so much extra work, that I'd rather spend working on my project, and not compiling.

I love that we in Linux world have compiling as an option for most apps, but there is a time and place for it.

Build chain problem, not an ARM one. That said, this is THE WORST problem. Having to recompile all dependencies to a platform target just so your own Makefile will build.

I feel like distros have an obligation to cross compile all packages for x86 and arm in their own build chains. That’s ultimately where this problem lies. You can’t apt install the dependencies you need to make install your thing.

The point is this is a problem you have on ARM. Your choices are select ARM, have this problem, or didn't select ARM and don't have this problem.

The Raspberry Pi ecosystem makes the device worthless as soon as you factor in commodity parts that have been marked up far beyond their generic counterparts. And then worst, all of the vendors selling generics targeting Raspberry Pi devices mark those up too, so it's wash. You're better off buying the official accessories because there's no benefit to buying the generics to save money.

After everything is accounted for, if you don't need access to GPIO, Intel chips and all their related hardware are a better value.

So Raspberry Pi beyond the model 4 isn't competitive anymore unless you factor in this specific requirement.

I love my Beelink mini PCs but there’s a use case for going raspberry pi and that’s power draw. Way easier to build a system that’s solar or battery powered.

That’s great if I have source code.

I don’t always. I find plenty of Linux stuff that was never compiled for ARM (printer drivers tend to be awful for this).

Actually, hardware video handling and not having to faff about with weird bootloaders have been the main reasons I have preferred mini-PCs

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