Got to be honest here this is a stupid comment.
There are literally skip fulls of consumer centric Linux hardware everywhere. Every damn computer shop is full of it. Gumtree, ebay, garages eveywhere. Computers are ubiquitous junk these days and Linux mostly works on all them them 100% better than it does on some low ball POS ARM board.
If they cared about access to computing they would be selling recycled guaranteed PCs with an easy to use Linux distribution. No they are selling BCM SoCs stuffed on the lowest part count board they could get away with and Liz is drinking a lot of wine.
Righto, but how often do you see "linux running on junk" promoted in the mainstream media? Never. The detail you actually miss here is marketing and exposure. If you care about promoting alternative an OS for people to experiment with (like I do), offering a shiny, compact product like a Pi is infinitely more appealing than getting people to bin dive for a filthy beige PC, and then convince them spending countless of frustrating hours trying to find and install a suitable distro on an obsolete system with a buggy BIOS.
I'm 100% on board with any scheme that encourages people off proprietary operating systems and onto open source platforms and hardware. And if there is a profitable way to do that for a company THAT'S EVEN BETTER! System founded on open source principles and actually makes money... think about it... it's literally the best of both worlds.
low ball POS ARM board
Absolute nonsense. It's an awesome low power device. I use a single Pi as a server, which runs Docker with containers such as Apache, PiHole, Deluge + WireGuard, Samba, Grafana, Prometheus, etc. It doesn't even break a sweat, and is great for saving on electricity because of its awesome performance/watt characteristics.
This is quite funny because I run 20-odd production prometheus clusters on docker/kubernetes and there's one thing prometheus needs absolutely and that is IOPS and reliable storage. Putting it on a Pi is a stupid idea. It looks like it will work but it's going to burn fairly quickly. Also when it runs out of RAM, which it will (our proms are on 64Gb nodes), it goes down hard and will not start up again until you feed it much more RAM than the quiescent amount as it needs 2x more of it on startup than usual runtime to recover the data segments from the disk.
Ramming all that stuff into a Pi to save electricity will result in a miserable day where you lose all your stuff. I guarantee it. My day job is doing this stuff professionally and I know how it works and where it will fail and how sad people are going to be. My sample size is huge compared to personal experiences on this matter.
Regarding running stuff on junk, you can buy ready turd polished junk on ebay for virtually nothing. I've been supplying those things to people for at least two decades to keep them going for low cost. And usually these days the machine comes with a Windows 10 license. Prior to her dropping dead I bought my mother a nice i7 desktop with 16Gb of RAM and a 256Gb SSD with a Windows 10 license on the case for £139. That's 1000x time better ROI even if the outlay is higher and the electricity difference is ~£20 a year.
it is not worth costing yourself 10x the effort to save £20 a yearDave pointed out that the Pi was aimed at the education market earlier, which is correct. This is my main objection. If you've ever spoken to anyone who had to run the piles of excrement in a school environment, you will understand why this fails. Also why there's a large box of broken ones at my daughter's school which are scrapped.
The expensive thing is time and pissing out 20 minutes per student per lesson trying to get the damn thing working reliably, dealing with flakey connectors, power supplies, SD cards and crashes is not a good education experience. It's a 10x sunk cost already the moment you pay for it. They now have windows desktops running python and visual studio code on windows.
I will say this and I don't care but
Liz and Ben though marketing hype have actually damaged people's education. All they did is blow people's time away and put a lot of people off entering the industry by presenting them with a wall of problems to solve before they could even begin their education