[rodh257]

I think the tech media built these devices up a bit too much to the general consumer public. They are really a learning tool that you can tinker with, not a 'cheap pc' like they were built up to be. So many people got theirs after the pre-order wait and immediately complained about the performance. Think of them as a beefed up Arduino style device and you'll love it, think of it as a cheap computer for consumer use and you'll obviously be unhappy.

[gravitronic]

It's not that simple. The device has the potential to be an easy to use pc for the general public, but the community hasn't finished the software yet. The media reported the potential not the reality (there isn't a large quantity and it's just a little debian box).

As for the people who have one (like me) a large portion of the complaints aren't about the total performance capability, but it's the stability.. mine crashes all the time. There's some talk about fixing a bug in the USB driver that'll solve the issue (everything hangs up for 2-4 minutes every 20 minutes on average) but until that's finished it's rather unusable.

[jrockway]

It sounds like using one like an Arduino involves a lot of extra work, like installing Linux. With an AVR or ARM microcontroller, all you have to do is flash your program, everything else is pretty much burned on the chip forever.

[ralph]

The Foundation have recently released a new distro, based on Raspbian, that gives better performance and is now their recommendation. Hardware floating point and better use of the ARM's instructions. X11 graphics performance still to be improved. http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1605