[detaro]

> please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things

Not just a naked Pi (and even if that's the goal it's typically not done with just the pi, you need some amount of stuff around it too). E.g. the previous version of the Pi-Top is $319 (Pi included)

[sdinsn]

I know, the easy solution is to buy plain Pi's, not avoid Pi's altogether.

[blhack]

And what do you do with a plain pi that you couldn't do with an instance of Idle running on a desktop PC?

[sdinsn]

For example, if I want to create something to monitor and auto water my garden. I don't want to have a laptop sitting outside 24/7 or a line inside and require my desktop PC on 24/7.

[blhack]

So youre running an entire Linux environment to turn a relay/solenoid on and off?

Now imagine you’re a kid who had the idea to water your garden with a computer. On an arduino, you’d write about 20 lines of code.

On a PI...I mean, how do you even get a computer program to run at boot? What’s a computer program? Okay I have a .img file now what? Python? But some people say I should use $somethingelse. Okay I need another monitor to connect to it? Open up my router and find a DHCP entry so I can SSH into it? What do ANY of those words mean?

“Oh well I’ll get to it someday.”

Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of raspberry pis in many different projects, and in fact I’d make a strong wager that I have deployed more raspi projects than most people who consider themselves huge raspi fans. For SOME things there isn’t a substitute. For most things they’re extremely discouraging.

[sdinsn]

I don't understand your comment. Yes, you could do it with an Arduino too, or any other computer, or a microcontroller.

From my experience, RPi might be more appealing since it runs a real OS and you can have a desktop environment.

[hartzell]

What is "Idle" (link?)? thanks!

[applecrazy]

IDLE is a Python code editor, REPL, and runner. Ships with Python by default.

[hartzell]

Wow, never knew that was there. Learn something new everyday. Thanks!