

I bought my first Pi in (I think) 2014. It’s one of the things that got me into IT. The low price was an important feature, since I was much less reluctant to experiment and take risks with hardware that cost as much as a family meal. But nearly $400 the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
I guess I’m lucky in that I got a pi 5 back when they were selling at MSRP. I have a couple Pi 4’s, two 3’s (one I can’t find anymore sadly), my original Pi 1 model B, an also lost Pi zero W that I successfully soldered the GPIO pin headers to, and a Pi 400 I bought on a whim.
When people ask me about experimenting with Linux I usually tell them to either emulate it in virtualBox or buy a Raspberry Pi if they want a bare metal experience. It was specifically because the Pi was cheap and thus low risk if something did go wrong.



Double posting but…
FOSS has problems too. Personality clashes can end or severely set back projects (MMDVM vs M17). If something isn’t fun *coughAccessibilitycough* it doesn’t get done. Projects get abandoned as devs loose interest because interest is the only motivator. Documentation usually sucks because the dev is the one doing the documenting and doesn’t understand that the end user doesn’t have their intuitive grasp of the software they themselves wrote. And 99% of the population doesn’t care a whit about code being open because surprise surprise they’re not software developers and won’t know the difference between = and ==. And no they’re not going to take night classes just to patch some program they use.