Mozilla hopes to challenge Raspbian as RPi OS of choice The Mozilla Foundation staged a Mozilla Festival in the UK over the weekend, and one of the projects developers delivered was a port of Firefox OS working to the Raspberry Pi. Mozilla has big ambitions for its OS on the Pi, stating the following four objectives for a future Pi-compatible release: Be at parity with Raspbian/ …
"What does FirefoxOS offer apart from being produced by an organisation that is crippled by political correctness and a desire to employ as many so-called minorities as possible?"
Crippling pointless featuritis and a bigger "f--- you" attitude than David Cameron crossed with the Sex Pistols?
Well, if it has hardware acceleration all round (as the competition with both Raspbian and the unnamed media players would suggest), then it's perhaps worthy of consideration. Right now I do some browsing and desktop work on raspbian but I have to switch SD cards to watch movies (which means waiting a full 15 seconds for the Pi to reboot, insufferable ain't it?).
No seriously, hardware accel. for the desktop would be nice. Having that nice GPU sitting iddly while the CPU struggles at full steam is a shame.
Switch SD cards? Noobs multi-boot will fix that, though still need to reboot.
Or just buy a Pi to dedicate to OpenELEC
For a small, low-power desktop take a look at the new Zotac Pico wotsit. Seems quite good, though Win8+Bing and about 5x the cost of a Pi. But definitely more usable as a full desktop.
I really like the idea of being able to deploy the Pi (or an HDMI TV stick) as a thin client which could fire up a VPN connection automatically and launch a remote desktop session.
Switch SD cards? Noobs multi-boot will fix that, though still need to reboot
The advantage of this solution would be? I see a lot of reasons to keep the systems on separate SD cards, and none for the multi-boot solution.
Or just buy a Pi to dedicate to OpenELEC
Yeah, I totally see how this would make more sense than my solution of dedicating a SD card to OpenELEC. NOT.
For a small, low-power desktop take a look at the new Zotac Pico wotsit. Seems quite good, though Win8+Bing and about 5x the cost of a Pi.
Not even close to being as low-power, and it's about 10x the price, not 5x. For that price I can have a laptop complete with monitor, trackpad and keyboard. And it's Windows. EIGHT. The Pico wotsit strikes me as a (failed) replacement for my Asus 900, not for my Pi.
But definitely more usable as a full desktop
That's entirely debatable. My Pi running Raspbian does very well as a full desktop. It runs Veusz, iPython, claws-mail, xpdf, Pycocuma, Midori, GVim and lout -even LibreOffice. Everything I need for work. Of course for video (including Youtube and the like) I have to turn to OpenELEC; so what? Different use, different SD card, and that's how I like it.
The Zotac Pico on the other hand, I'm pretty sure installing the Scipy/numpy stack and lout on this would be nightmare-ish, and the beast of an OS it runs means that despite the rather enormously more powerful CPU and RAM it's probably not much more responsive -if at all.
I really like the idea of being able to deploy the Pi (or an HDMI TV stick) as a thin client which could fire up a VPN connection automatically and launch a remote desktop session.
It's a bit of a waste of resources if you ask me, but that wouldn't be very difficult. I can't be arsed to check the google but there is even probably a SD card image or five out there that do exactly that.
I re-read my post and it comes across like an anti-zotac rant. That wasn't the point. I would like to play with the zotac, it looks pretty nice, although installing a proper OS would be my very first move. It's just not in the same category as the Pi, and for that price if I wanted the max bang for my bucks I'd get a chromebook. But bang-for-the-buck is not always what matters.
Hopefully this is bigger than just the Pi and shows that all these small, cheap and very capable SBCs are on Moz's radar as being worthy platforms for development. That will give the whole sector a boost - just so long as Moz doesn't become the Gorilla in the room and dominates the entire ecosystem.
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