I am, but I’m also somewhat pessimistic about 3D printing in the consumer space in general. It seems like it’s in a bit of a lul right now.

Good catch with the disk encryption stuff! Tumbleweed never fails to surprise me with how stable it is for a rolling release distro!

This made me chuckle, thanks!

Beep Boop I’m in ur Lemmys astroturfin ur as yet unavailable SBCs.

Nah in all seriousness I too don’t need a pi 5. I just respect what the people behind the Pi project are doing, and it upsets me that people are mad about what is in my opinion a very solid evolution of the Pi because of the availability issues of the Pi 4 during the largest supply shortage the world has seen in ALL consumer goods, not just hobbyist SBCs. Yes that sucked, but there were shortages in virtually everything else too. They also happen to be manufactured in my hometown which means they get a special place in my heart.

Brb sifting thru ur data and targeting ads.

When I say easy to get, I don’t necessarily mean “in stock” - and that is obviously a huge consideration. What I do mean that as far as I know the Pi foundation plans to keep manufacturing older boards for a long time since some customers can’t just easily upgrade to the latest Pi, let alone move to a whole new platform. Is the Beelink x86 PC you got last week going to still be for sale without any significant revisions in 6 months?

Lol I assure you I’m no bot. I just think that people forget that the Pi fills a niche that I know many self hosty types like myself no longer need it to fill, and the Pi 5 imo is another slam dunk in terms of nailing filling that particular niche. Other ARM SBCs tend to always have trouble with GPU hardware acceleration due to the weird MediaTek or rockchip SoCs they have or end up pinned to some ancient kernel version missing sources.

I too moved away from Pis to an X86 setup (https://kn100.me/erying-11800h/) something I talk about in great detail in that blog post, but appreciate the Pi exists and continues to evolve in the way it is. Not everything is about mac compute per dollar for everybody!

While there are now X86 SBC / Mini Computers that aren’t far off the Pi in price, the real benefits of the Pi aren’t just the fact that it offers a certain amount of compute for a certain price.

• It’s still lower power than most x86 SBCs overall, which matters with portable/remote applications

• Its schematics are usually available

• They’re easy to get and have a usually guaranteed availability, so when one dies you should be able to get another

• its got a decent ecosystem around it of hardware and software, which basically nobody else can claim

• it’s a fairly standard form factor, so fits into existing stuff well.

• It’s likely we will see a compute module for the Pi 5 as well at a guess, which means you can treat the vanilla Pi 5 as a dev board for whatever product you’re developing, and then use a potential CM5 as the core of your product once it’s ready to go!

If all you need is a home server or a Linux box, then sure get an X86 SBC, but the Pi isn’t irrelevant, not by a long shot! Congratulations on releasing yet another sweet spot product, I’ll be picking one up as soon as I think of a use for one!