I like Chrome Remote Desktop for ease of use and for the ability to get to all of my machines no matter where I am. Great when using Chromebooks, too.

I believe both all of the video conferencing services (Zoom, Teams, Google, …) are currently incompatible with German law, as far as allowing kids to use them. I don’t remember the exact details, but I recall that it was actual some EU wide regulation that triggered this issue, but national laws don’t always fully implement all EU laws. So, some countries might have been more relaxed. Also, some schools in Germany were initially more pragmatic and allowed the use of video conferencing.

But most of these programs got shut down by the authorities after making national news.

I didn’t even expect that much. Video conferencing would have been awesome. But I was perfectly prepared to settle for email. Turns out, even that wasn’t allowed in our school district

It’s not just shareholders that have to be concerned, it’s end-users too.

I have lived both in the US and in the EU and move back and forth every so often. It’s surreal to see how far the EU lags behind in technology and userfriendly services. The internet feels completely different from the US – and not in a good way.

Lot’s of things that can be done very easily from my computer while in the US are completely impossible or at least extremely limited when living in Europe. Companies are very afraid of regulatory restrictions (rightly or mistakenly) and simply don’t offer the same online products. It feels very backwards. Subjectively, European web services feel like what the internet was like in the US in the early 2000’s. That’s 20 years behind.

I fully understand why the EU wants to regulate online behavior, but the politicians making these decisions don’t have a good understanding of how technology works; and in the interest of making populist policy choices, they regularly throw out the baby with the bath water.

Just to give an example: I lived in Europe during the lockdowns, and my kids weren’t allowed to send their teachers e-mail, because the school was afraid that doing so would violate my kids’ rights. They couldn’t articulate exactly what their worry was, but there was a lot of fear mongering about EU regulations and punative penalties that they’d expose themselves to. The upshot was that once a week, written letters would be exchanged with the teachers. This completely brought all learning to a standstill.

On the other hand, our US school made sure that all teachers were availably by Zoom conference at any time that the kids needed to talk to them. When we told the European school, they said that this was horrible and would certainly never be allowed in any civilized country…

The nice thing with Raspberry Pi is that they have been around for a very long time, you know what you get, and software support is quite reliable. Even years later, you can still get new distributions for older devices. That’s all really useful, when you want to build a device that needs to run for a couple of years.

At this point, I will buy either a CM4 or a Zero2W depending on my specific needs – and assuming I can hunt it down. Availability is still rather spotty, but has been improving considerably in the last couple of weeks.

RISC-V single-board computers can’t quite compete on the same level. It simply isn’t clear whether a board that you buy today will still receive support six months from now. And performance or price isn’t really a compelling factor either. There are plenty of ARM-based non-Raspberry single-board computers that outperform any of the RISC-V offerings. And they probably have a better track record as far as long-term support is concerned, but not as good as Rapberry Pi solutions.

The reason to buy a RISC-V board would be for you to gain experience with this technology. But honestly, the ISA matters very little. It’ll look just like any other Linux system, with maybe a few gaps in what is supported.

Now, long-term, I am quite optimistic about RISC-V and expect that it’ll push ARM out of the market for these type of devices. But for the time being, there is very little reason to switch just yet.