Microsoft forced PC buyers to use their software by making deals with OEMs to preinstall it on every PC, hiding the cost of the software from the consumer. Most consumers did not purchase a PC with no software installed, and then purchase a license to Windows separately; the software and license came with the computer.
There are probably more similarities between Apple and Microsoft than there are differences, however tempting it may be to focus on the differences.
People love to criticise the RPi. It has its flaws and shortcomings. Nevertheless, it is a rare example of a computer that does not come with an "OS" preinstalled. Buyers can choose from a variety of OS and make their own bootable SD cards.
The raspberry pi does have an OS preinstalled that users cant remove, which is why its so hard to get full support for the basic linux stack on there. The GPU has a proprietary low level OS/firmware blob that handles basic system functions and loading linux and starting the CPU once all that is done and is required for the board to start. This is a big part of why Armbian/Ubuntu dont have full support yet for example. Its not impossible but its weird and complex for OS developers and one of the strengths of the alternative boards, which can generally boot and run a full linux stack with hardware support for everything on the board.
A bunch of hardware acceleration (primarily involving the GPU because of the weird it-runs-its-own-mini-OS situation) are either not currently implemented or can only be used via a rather hacky kludge. Once the GPU boots and passes off execution to the Arm cpu that works mostly as intended, but talking to the GPU again and getting it to do heavy lifting is still a work in progress.
I drool over the Odroid N2+, but mostly I just use a Raspberry Pi. 32 bit Raspbian is fine for me and most of it works fine (although the fake kernel mode switching video driver is less then ideal) and i don't really care to lose the huge community for when I need to figure out an issue. Makes figuring out problems a google search solution and not a debug probe solution.
I think steps are being made to open up the architecture.
Documentation of a lot of it has been published, but only a partial drivers have been developed by the community.
for example, I think mesa has some opengl hardware acceleration and I know kodi does hardware video decoding. I also believe there's some work on u-boot.
Microsoft forced PC buyers to use their software by making deals with OEMs to preinstall it on every PC, hiding the cost of the software from the consumer. Most consumers did not purchase a PC with no software installed, and then purchase a license to Windows separately; the software and license came with the computer.
There are probably more similarities between Apple and Microsoft than there are differences, however tempting it may be to focus on the differences.
People love to criticise the RPi. It has its flaws and shortcomings. Nevertheless, it is a rare example of a computer that does not come with an "OS" preinstalled. Buyers can choose from a variety of OS and make their own bootable SD cards.