[fellowmartian]

There’s nothing wrong with this, RPi is a great platform for hardware startups because it’s one of the very few platforms with a good, well-documented Linux distro, a million HATs for easy prototyping, and a community to help you out.

It was never meant just for education and hobbyists, Raspberry Pi Foundation absolutely supports the commercial use case, and their newer products like CM4 even more so.

I’d wager you never tried to launch an embedded Linux-powered product, because if you did you’d quickly realize that building custom images from obscure Linux and U-Boot forks is just not fun. Raspberry Pi solved that for everybody, this is why it’s popular among startups even though it’s not the best hardware around spec- and cost-wise.

[internetter]

> I’d wager you never tried to launch an embedded Linux-powered product

I'd wager most people go with a RTOS

[AlotOfReading]

Outside a few open source options like zephyr (and FreeRTOS to a lesser extent), RTOSes typically have a worse developer experience than even the shittiest vendor kernel trees. At least Linux doesn't dictate your choice of dev tools like most of the commercial RTOSes do and the libc usually works.

[internetter]

I quite like Zephyr? Are you saying it's somehow worse than Linux? I agree there's plenty of garbage though.

[AlotOfReading]

The opposite. Zephyr is one of the more ergonomic RTOSes. Compare that experience to what's offered by VxWorks or Green Hills, which feel like taking a time machine back to the early 2000s in terms of productivity and features.

[internetter]

Thank god I've been privileged to not be forced into using commercial RTOSes

[fellowmartian]

You’d only do that if you absolutely have to, eg when you’re very constrained by battery or you do actually need real time guarantees. Getting a device with Wi-Fi, BLE, GPS, logging, camera, etc working on a RTOS is just unreasonably complicated when you have a huge battery and 2W power consumption of the SBC is dwarfed by a kilowatt motor.