Playing around with the RPi is great fun. It reminds me of the early days where I was just exploring computers.

I've been doing some Python on it. I bought it with a bunch of electronic parts and have got a ultrasonic sensor measuring distances. I followed an online tutorial which involved plugging in a few components and half a page of code.

The support for this sort of tinkering is very good, it was really easy to get it up and running.

Getting more involved meant finding out about the Linux audio system/s and bridging them and generally installing lots of stuff. If you're lucky it'll have an ugly 1990s style UI. If you're not, it's back to the command line and man pages.
So, it's fun but you have to put up with Linux and it's quirks.


It's much more fun than I expected and building stuff is really quite easy. They've got very good support for this in the built-in Python.

BTW They're more popular than I expected. They had sold 8 million by the time the RPi 3 shipped and they sold half a million of those in a 1 month!