Views on the raspberry pi

What are your guys views, on the raspberry pi? Tons of kids in my school are like "OMG IT'S LIKE A COMPOOTER YOU CAN PROGRAM YOURSELF LOOK I MADE IT SAY HELLO WORLD IN PYTHON" now don't get me wrong, everyone needs to start somewhere, it's just why with this, what's wrong with just installing linux on your laptop, it's just a slow linux computer. As far as I can tell it's only use is teaching intermediate programmers lower level stuff when they start using the GPIO pins and such.

>>79
It's not "emulation" at all; it's just stuff that's been there since the beginning and not touched. E.g. an 8254 is an 8254 no matter if it's the one in a PC AT or an i7 system, and works exactly the same.

The "undocumented quirks" you're mentioning are no longer undocumented, having been around for so long; FYI the standard VGA has NOT changed even in the latest GPUs, as otherwise the BIOS would have no idea how to even display the initial POST info. You seem to be talking about the time when PCs were a lot less compatible with each other, but that was the pre-Pentium days.

ACPI is another matter altogether, but if you need to interact with that then it's beyond basic PC programming.