Les Pounder works with groups such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation to help boost people’s maker skills.
As I write this, we have just celebrated 12 years (or three if you follow leap years) of Raspberry Pi. It is hard to think of a time when there wasn’t a lowcost, credit-card-sized computer for our projects. In those 12 years, Raspberry Pi has sold 61 million units (www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-picelebrates-12-years-as-salesbreak-61-million-units). Of that total, 57 million are Linux-based computers, the remaining four million being Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers.
Let that sink in: 61 million units is a lot of single-board computers or microcontrollers powering hacks as diverse as screaming jelly babies (the original GPIO Hello World back in 2012) to powering industrial machinery. The Raspberry Pi has become a major part of the Linux ecosystem and it has inspired and educated many of those who now work in open source and Linux projects.
Back in 2012, we didn’t know what to expect from the Raspberry Pi. Initially it was a single-core Arm CPU running at 700MHz, with only 256MB of RAM. A later revision saw double the RAM but it wasn’t until the Raspberry Pi 2 that we saw a quad-core Arm CPU.
Fast-forward to 2024 and we have the potent Raspberry Pi 5. Quad-core Arm CPUs running at 2.4GHz, easily overclocked to 3GHz, 4 or 8GB of RAM, and now we have easy access to NVMe. I’m not going to say that 2024 is the year of the Linux desktop, but we now have a low-cost Linux desktop that can also be used in many different projects.