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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

The pi is useful because it is well supported. Either buy a x86, or buy pi - anything else and good luck keeping it working. You need to plan on spending your time writing/maintain the drivers to keep your system working.

Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers.

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I have at one point faced the “should I buy x86 instead”, and decided low-power Intel CPUs make it viable. Guess I’m gonna pick the x86.

The latest low power Intel is very nice. ARM beats it for doing nothing, but when getting things done things are more complex.

>> Either buy a x86, or buy pi - anything else and good luck keeping it working.

Disagree.

For example, Toradex i.MX8 is supported until 2035 and possibly beyond.

Maybe. Read the fine print of your contract closely. I am not familiar with that system, but my experience with boards like this is that they have "support", but often not in the mainline kernel, it is in patches that they apply to some yocto build and so you are always several years behind the latest kernel. You may also discover that the support doesn't cover some accessories and so you may not be able to upgrade if you want wifi to work. They will backport knows CVE fixes, but anything that was fixed without realizing it should be a CVE will never be back ported.

That level of vendor support is not exactly unusual, and is adequate for many commercial purposes.

It's fair to say that the Pi Foundation goes beyond the bare mminimum. But it's far from the only option for Linux on a SoC.

> Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers.

Reminds me of Adobe's history to be honest. They also were big on hooking the young to their ecosystem, including turning more than one blind eye towards piracy, and once they had a captive userbase plus a lack of competition, they enshittified.

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