cutiepi-board VS cutiepi-shell

I like the CutiePi design.

One decent example I can think of off the top of my head is the CutiePi, which is a cool little tablet with a UI built with QML.

Mistaken.

Personally I've been waiting for the CutiePi to use the CM4, and now they have updated the platform I'll probably get one myself.

Having said that it looks like a missed opportunity here for supplying the masses with a Linux device for learning purposes especially in the developing countries during the pandemic or not. I think the best price for this device is USD$100 as promised by the ill fated OLPC laptop project. Perhaps USD$100 is not much by developed countries standard incomes but in most part of developing countries you are very lucky to have USD$100 disposable income at the end of the month (or year) to buy your children a tablet/laptop/computer.

It also interesting to note that the 2019 Galaxy Tab A (without LTE) with similar specs (8", 2 GB RAM, etc) to the CutiePie is probably cost about USD$100 nowadays [1].

The good news is that since CutiePie is based on open hardware system perhaps someone can use the open design to come up with a cheaper version closer to the USD$100 price point[2].

p/s: RPi 400 costs about USD$100 but the fact it does not has a built-in screen limits it impacts on usability department for children

[1]https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_tab_a_8_0_(2019)-976...

[2]https://github.com/cutiepi-io/cutiepi-board

It's just a Pi running ARM64 Linux.

The default OS image that ships on the devices has their own touch UI shell which currently runs on EGLFS, which is basically an alternative to X or Wayland meant for embedded devices. So as it currently stands you can't run normal Linux apps in the default OS.

They're supposedly porting it to Wayland which will allow normal Linux applications to run within their custom shell. Their shell is a relatively straightforward Qt Quick application so it shouldn't take a huge amount of work to port. Though the most recent commit was a little over a year ago[1] so who knows when it'll actually get finished.

[1] https://github.com/cutiepi-io/cutiepi-shell/tree/wayland