Raspberry/Pi 3? Meh

I was mostly offline during last three days. You know — meeting long-time-no-see friends, walking tens of kilometres in other city looking at cellphone screen (aka playing Ingress) etc.

But even then it was hard to not notice that Raspberry Foundation announced new version of their product called Raspberry/Pi 3 — many friends asked me what do I think about it, is it worth buying now, will Fedora run on it etc.

So let make it short. No, it will not run Fedora 24 because there is no support for this device (I would not call it developer board as it would be insult to all developer boards) in mainline kernel, it still boots in insane way, has new binary blob without permissions to distribute etc… And since R/Pi 2 got released year ago there was no community effort to get this board supported and we have better things to do.

Is it worth buying? If all you want to do is connect few sensors to GPIO/I²C/SPI pins then maybe as it is cheap, but I would go for Beaglebone to get wide distribution support. If you want to make a desktop then forget it (1GB of memory). If you want to make anything related to storage/networking forget it too (storage on USB shared with all other USB devices as there is only one USB host port).

For years Raspberry Foundation did not learn that price is not the only thing which makes product worth using. BCM2835 was terrible but usable. BCM2836 got newer cpu core but rest stayed so resulting device was far behind properly made developer boards. BCM2837 should not happen.

beaglebone fedora raspberrypi ubuntu