Eben Upton says hobbyists remain "incredibly important" while he's involved.

The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London. CEO Eben Upton tells Ars that should the IPO happen, it will let Raspberry Pi’s not-for-profit side expand by “at least a factor of 2X.” And while it’s “an understandable thing” that Raspberry Pi enthusiasts could be concerned, “while I’m involved in running the thing, I don’t expect people to see any change in how we do things.”

  • Dizzy Devil DuckyEnglish
    14•10 months ago

    So, when Raspberry Pi is inevitably enshitified if they go through with this, who’s gonna be the next big (rather, small) company to get something Pi equivalent to run an OS like Lakka or Recalbox?

    I honestly don’t know since I don’t know of any other companies making these kinds of mini computers.

    • @CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6•10 months ago

      There are plenty of alternative SBCs out there, many mimicking the RPi form factor as well. Look into Radxa, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, Pine64, ODROID, etc. I picked up an Indiedroid Nova board last year that is RPi form factor but has the more powerful RK3588 processor. Drivers are still WIP but it is quite fast. I also run my home server on a Radxa Rock Pi 4, which has an RK3399 processor and is very comparable to the RPi 4. Drivers for it are pretty solid these days and it doesn’t require extra work to set up. Just download an Armbian image and go.

        • @CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3•10 months ago

          Pretty much all the alternative SBCs are either Rockchip or Allwinner if you want ARM. There are a few RISC-V SBCs now but software support isn’t as solid and many of these lack GPUs. There are also a few x86/64 SBCs based on either older Intel Atom or newer mobile parts too.

          • @gondezee@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1•10 months ago

            Yea in one of my other comments down somewhere here I mentioned riscv as a hopeful future option, maybe with someone like AMD spending some resources to bring another viable solution to market. I know AMD is working on RISCV, they’ve got some low power SOCs already. I’m wondering if they got something in the pipes…

    • @iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      3•10 months ago

      There are literally dozens of alternative products to the Raspberry Pi, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Do a web search for “single board computer” or even just “raspberry pi alternatives”, and see for yourself.

    • ferretEnglish
      3•10 months ago

      SBCs are a fairly mature space nowadays. Plenty of options.