What is benefit of buying a Pi rather than Linux Partition.

Thanks for the comments. But I think Raspberry Pi is not for me. Well least not at the moment.

I have two daughters one 15 and one 19 neither are into IT I am glad to say. I have spent 40 years in the I.T. industry 30 years with IBM, but would not recommend it as a career. Least it did not work out great for me. A lot of your skils become redundant and even if you work on a sucessful project it gets replaced n months down the line. After 40 years of age you are really vunerable to be replaced by younger cheaper people, unless you are into management of project management. Experience and adaptability does not seem to count for much. Plus in recent years there has been a lot of offshoring to India and China.

The Pi would be for me to play with, but it does not work out cheap as I don't have room in my study for a extra TV screen which I don't have anyway and would have to upgrade my monitor from VGA. Plus no doubt there would be powered hub, SD cards etc.

As far as electronic interfacing is concerned. I have a number of unfinished PIC projects that I really should complete before moving on.

I have run Linux (Ubuntu) for a number of years so if the Pi throws up any interesting software, I hope it will also be available on x86.

The Pi is certainly creating a lot of interest and I hope it succeeds, but it worries me that I have seen a lot of machines go to the local dump that were better specified than a 300Mhz Pentium 2. I also am concerned that schools will spend a lot of money buying TV's etc when they could just as well install scratch/squeek/Logo on their existing equipment.

Your assessment sounds very reasonable, Keith.

The Pi is just a board, and if it doesn't fulful your requirements then it doesn't.  It would not be rational to buy it just because of the hype and peergroup pressure from fanbois.

Perhaps one day you'll have a requirement that it does satisfy, or perhaps by then some competing device will be even better or even cheaper, who knows.  Always be rational in your choices.  It sounds like you have thought about it well enough and made a reasonable decision here.  Perhaps the explanation you have given could even be of value to others in similar circumstances, and hence was useful.

Your assessment sounds very reasonable, Keith.

The Pi is just a board, and if it doesn't fulful your requirements then it doesn't.  It would not be rational to buy it just because of the hype and peergroup pressure from fanbois.

Perhaps one day you'll have a requirement that it does satisfy, or perhaps by then some competing device will be even better or even cheaper, who knows.  Always be rational in your choices.  It sounds like you have thought about it well enough and made a reasonable decision here.  Perhaps the explanation you have given could even be of value to others in similar circumstances, and hence was useful.