Comment by Aurornis
17 days ago
> I think a lot of people don't realize that there was a decent size, but small market for SBCs for low-volume embedded work (including hobbyists) before Raspberry Pi. You could get a lot of different kinds of boards with good Linux support and a not terrible price.
And you still can! The big innovation from Raspberry Pi was making it all feel very accessible through the documentation, community, and various utilities to configure things via menus instead of by editing files.
The Raspberry Pi was rarely the best board, but it was the easiest to recommend to beginners because you could point them to volumes of documentation and community threads.
Agreed... great community support, generally "just works" and even if you don't use half the features, it's a more reliable baseline.