I've noticed Raspberry Pi posts here always attract tons of negative comments, regardless of what the article is about.
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As a desktop candidate role I would say that there is a pain of bones broken in the past. I have System Shock (1) for DOS and for MacOS. DOS version was playable in NTVDM for long, especially in 32-bit XP with VDMSound. MacOS version was, to be precise, Mac OS Classic version for Motorola CPU. And Mac OS switched CPU from Motorola to PowerPC. They had emulator bundled, but only for one switch. Soon after Motorola-to-PowerPC switch they did PowerPC-to-Intel switch. And Intel Mac OS did run PowerPC applications, but did not run Motorola applications. So I have managed to unpack StuffIt archives with System Shock for Mac OS, but never managed to run it. Actually, Intel transition was not momentarily. There was Intel x86 Mac OS and Intel x86-64 Mac OS. 10.4 Tiger could possibly run something 64-bit, but not GUI apparently. Later Mac OS introduced nice Objective-C 2.0 features as 64-bit only. Mac OS 10.6 was the last one to have Rosetta for PowerPC, and I hear complaints that it was a loss. Some games were left in PowerPC era, and "Mavericks forever" movement (10.8, the last skeuomorphic Mac OS) reports they regret not having access to PowerPC. And as you may now, modern Mac OS went to ARM. Each time there is a leap to another architecture, bones break. Legacy do not work anymore, and companies want us to move on, but we don't want to. Our broken bones hurt.
There is an ongoing problem with ARM being proprietary architecture. Our trained bones predict future pain. Again! When will be the end to this sufferring? If we are to adopt open RISC-V 64 in the end, let's just do it now and not get used to anything ARM.
I think that's a combination of things:
1) The company "sold out". That is, in times of limited supply they prioritized fulfilling large compute module orders instead of the hobbyist market that initially supported them. To be fair if I was running that company I'd have done the exact same thing, it's obviously the right financial choice. Just, you know, it'll sting for the market that was shunned.
2) They got expensive. Especially for the Pi 4 which was still dreadfully slow. That slowness was excusable at $25. Not great but okay at $35. But when suddenly it was near enough to $100+ by the time you got all the required "accessories"? Or like the Pi 5 16gb is $132 like what on earth.
3) They got 'flaky'. It used to be the pi was the rock-solid option in the space. But now they keep making weird low-reliability decisions. Like the Pi 5 "expects" a rather uniquely high amp USB-C charger. 5A @ 5V is not a common USB-C charger feature. So whatever you happen to grab is probably not sufficient, and you'll have those annoying low power warnings randomly. They chose to have dual 4k HDMI ports and went with micro-HDMI. Which is a flaky connector you probably don't have cables for (and also dual 4K? on a pi?). They kept using microSD cards. The CPU power draw increased significantly, which for the performance delta is more than justified, except it still ships without any cooling.
One misconception that everyone keeps repeating is that the pi 5 expects and needs a 5v/5a power supply to work. The CPU and all the IO will work as expected with any USB pd charger that can do at least 15 watts. The only issue you will have is a power limit on USB peripherals that use a lot of power like hard drives. Keyboards, mice and webcams will work just fine with the 600 milliamp power limit.
Previous raspberry pis had low usb power limits and people did not consider those products dead on arrival. Now that they are trying to address a limitation in the original product people are discovering that the raspberry pi was always a very limited platform to begin and the next step is not an incremental bump to the specs but to just buy a regular computer.
Except as soon as you have some issue first comment will be "are you using official power supply"? I hate such comments with passion. Feels very corporatish support.
Did you check to make sure you were using the official power supply before posting?
All of this plus, in regards to, number 2, x86 got cheap. For $80(well, pre tariffs at least) I can deal with a Pi 5s quirks and slowness, or I can buy a Radxa X4 with an Intel N100, a built in 2230 M.2 slot, 2.5GbE, and a Pi Pico with full GPIO. Software support? I have UEFI; literally anything I care to install will install from an ISO.
Literally the Radxa’s faults all boil down to the same faults the Pi has with the goofy form factor that forces you to cable squid, and the shitty microHDMI ports.
All for the same price.
Did Radxa ever iron out the heat sink issue with the X4? IIRC, when released, the official heat sink needed shimming to make proper contact with the processor.
For mine, following Explaining Computers' advice, I put in a copper shim, and that solved the issue. But I'm not sure if they ever sold through the stock of their first revision heatsink. I think they did, but I haven't bought another since the first two.
I'm going to add:
4) The penny-pinching RPi does on hardware: be it RTC, usb power kerfuffle or ARM crypto extensions (finally added in Pi 5)
5) accessory lock-down: see the situation with Pi cameras, or better yet DSI displays (CM4 datasheet: Although Linux kernel drivers are available, the DSI interface is not currently documented. Only DSI displays supported by the official Raspberry Pi firmware are supported.)
6) half-assed documentation (if you know, you know)
7) the ever-present marketing to compensate for the previous points, and the fact that it works
This is exacerbated by its popularity so people tend to treat raspberry pi as a hammer for all of their nails, while in many cases a 2$ mcu would suffice or a more network-capable SoC would be a much better fit (raspberry Pi NAS, pihole etc).
Pi5 with 4GB of ram is like £45 and runs fine for me on a standard super cheap 5v@3A charger. I think it's gone up probably less than inflation. I get where you're coming from though.
This is why I am negative on them. Apart from point 1, which I didn't really care about at the time.
And SDCards. Who kept making that decision?
No pointing device, which means you need an external mouse, no big deal except then you need a desk to put under the mouse. Unlike a laptop with a built in pointing device, so you can use it on your lap like its name suggests. Making that mistake in the 400 was, ok fine, a mistake. Perpetuating it to the 500 and now the 500+ just seems malicious.
And yeah, people say clip-on trackball, but I haven't seen one that fits on the 400 case and doesn't cost a bundle. Links would be appreciated.
These are good explanations. Their reputation as a platform for learning and tinkering was damaged, and subsequent missteps didn't improve the situation.
The Pi500+ does seem like a good system, but it's not alone at that price point, and people may still remember being told that they weren't the company's priority.