Re: Diversity - good or bad ?

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

On 1/11/25 2:50 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:04 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>

    So, for now, Manjaro and some Fedora. No one has yet made a clean
    Just Works port of Fedora for the Pi-5 alas ... something's WEIRD
    about that unit. They should drop it and make a "Pi4-Ultra" instead
    with a peppier version of that chip.

 There's a new Pi 5 version with 16GB of RAM. It's not clear what the use
case is. Windows on ARM?

>
 There's clearly something very convoluted about the
 way the CPU and maybe some peripherial chips start
 up on the Pi5. You could run many Linux distros on
 Pi's up thru the Pi4. Then ... the factory Deb deriv
 is pretty much IT unless you wanna suffer a lot.
>
 If you've ever watched a Pi update, note ALL the
 damned messages about special fix-ups and kernel
 hacks - I mean there's LOTS of them. The BCM2712
 do NOT boot smooth like earlier versions. I'll
 still say the Pi3s were the "most generally useful".
>
 As for the 16gb ... well, if it's not TOO much more
 expensive, may as well have it. However 4gb has
 always been more than enough for anything I've
 wanted to do with a Pi. Even the ancient 250mb
 ones worked OK with Linux - though I never tried
 OpenSUSE/KDE on a Pi-1.
>
 I did turn one into a muzak system though - 4 hour
 loops of 'mall/elevator music' from the 70s that
 would switch once a month. Ran for like a dozen
 years ... probably still is, unless somebody finally
 found where I hid it and smashed the thing with
 a hammer  :-)
>

I have a raspberry pi 3 still going strong as a TV computer after probably 7-8 years or so. The only problem is that my father forcefully unplugs it every time he vacuum cleans, so every couple of years the memory card gets corrupted and I have to do a full format/reinstall. But that doesn't take long, and since it is only every couple of years and not an important computer, that's ok.