[jerf]

The newbies are the reason. They need to know what the word is they need to search for, or they may not realize the full power they have for them, which is putatively the point of the RPis.

Personally I am also perturbed in that it contributes to the growing culture of seeing devices as something other than general-purpose computing machines, and I really fear the political implications of a growing misconception about the nature of these computers. What bothers me even more than these RPi tutorials are "Pedestrian Computer Application X Run On A Mobile Phone! Wowzers!" stories, some of which even make it onto HN (though not so much lately). Yes, you got your general purpose computer to run a program. This shouldn't be surprising, this should be the expected outcome, the news should be that you find yourself unable to run whatever program you like on these general-purpose computing devices.

RPis are computers. Cell phones are computers. The cheapest, crappiest feature phone currently being sold has specs that blow every computer I owned before 1990 out of the water. This is important for as many people as possible to understand, lest we blunder into walled gardens for no good reason.