This is an interesting idea, but I feel it's somewhat misplaced.
When I see the questions that are asked in RasPi communities, I feel that perhaps 90% could be asked (or, more likely, are already answered on) Ubuntu or Debian fora.
When Linux is installed on the device, many, many questions are more Linux related than hardware related.
This is a lack of understanding, and it's not really anybodies fault, which may be where a stack overflow type community should step in, cross referencing other great answers to solved problems.
An article on how to set up a VPN with the Pi, is entirely an article about how to set up a VPN on Ubuntu. The hardware is irrelevant.
This forum is not the best medium for that type of question.
The first step in learning how to tinker with devices, or anything, really, is an education that teaches you how to learn. When you know how to learn, you are opened up to a world of possibilities. This is what University is for. And there's clearly a bootstrap problem.
I purchased the Pine as it was the first reasonably priced aarch64 device. It may have been oversold, but I have headless Ubuntu running (thanks @longsleep) and now I can build and test Clang and Boost in an approximate environment that's useful for my own purposes.
For me, it's a pure dev board at a cost I can reasonably assume is a toy.
The first time I played with a dev board, it was an 8bit micro (8051) with 128bytes of RAM (yes, 128 bytes) and a Keil compiler that you had to teach the linker about the addresses that could be used for RAM, ROM, Flash, etc. There wasn't much documentation. (I recently heard Keil are moving to Clang, which I personally feel is pretty awesome). It took me weeks before I could get an LED to flash; that was my debugging tool for the next 2 months, before I got a console working and could debug a tad more effectively. I never learnt how to attach a debugger.
Pine64 was perhaps oversold, it's not a supercomputer or even a personal computer. It's a development device; I don't expect them to bring ARM64 to masses, but neither should I; most development is cross platform, very few do assembly any more, and most of those that do are doing it wrong.
To summarise, I don't see Pine64 as a leader in cheap educational devices aimed at teaching programming to kids, I see them as a provider of cheap aarch64 hardware, and they've succeeded.
Now, can we have a quad core a72 with 8GB RAM so I can really play?
When I see the questions that are asked in RasPi communities, I feel that perhaps 90% could be asked (or, more likely, are already answered on) Ubuntu or Debian fora.
When Linux is installed on the device, many, many questions are more Linux related than hardware related.
This is a lack of understanding, and it's not really anybodies fault, which may be where a stack overflow type community should step in, cross referencing other great answers to solved problems.
An article on how to set up a VPN with the Pi, is entirely an article about how to set up a VPN on Ubuntu. The hardware is irrelevant.
This forum is not the best medium for that type of question.
The first step in learning how to tinker with devices, or anything, really, is an education that teaches you how to learn. When you know how to learn, you are opened up to a world of possibilities. This is what University is for. And there's clearly a bootstrap problem.
I purchased the Pine as it was the first reasonably priced aarch64 device. It may have been oversold, but I have headless Ubuntu running (thanks @longsleep) and now I can build and test Clang and Boost in an approximate environment that's useful for my own purposes.
For me, it's a pure dev board at a cost I can reasonably assume is a toy.
The first time I played with a dev board, it was an 8bit micro (8051) with 128bytes of RAM (yes, 128 bytes) and a Keil compiler that you had to teach the linker about the addresses that could be used for RAM, ROM, Flash, etc. There wasn't much documentation. (I recently heard Keil are moving to Clang, which I personally feel is pretty awesome). It took me weeks before I could get an LED to flash; that was my debugging tool for the next 2 months, before I got a console working and could debug a tad more effectively. I never learnt how to attach a debugger.
Pine64 was perhaps oversold, it's not a supercomputer or even a personal computer. It's a development device; I don't expect them to bring ARM64 to masses, but neither should I; most development is cross platform, very few do assembly any more, and most of those that do are doing it wrong.
To summarise, I don't see Pine64 as a leader in cheap educational devices aimed at teaching programming to kids, I see them as a provider of cheap aarch64 hardware, and they've succeeded.
Now, can we have a quad core a72 with 8GB RAM so I can really play?
