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.

>>83
Did I say anything about super-VGA functionality (although there's always VESA for that...)?

You can't even tell whether your beloved 8254/8259 are even set up in the old fashion without checking for the damn ACPI tables. [...] The eternal desire to preserve DOS compatibility isn't helping things here.
WTF are you saying? DOS compatibility is precisely one of the reasons why the initial boot environment must be identical to that of a PC AT.