When the Pi 4 was perpetually out of stock, there were no real good alternatives for the projects that actually needed it. Yes, there were a lot of other SBCs, but the software support was not nearly as good as the Pi. The Pi 5 is so new that there aren’t really any existing project that would require one, so for those cases, just get a Pi 4. The stock situation has been much better the past few months.
For new projects, again just go with a Pi 4 for now, or maybe one of the alternative SBCs .
For those that want to build some sort of gaming/emulation system, for double the retail price of a Pi 5, just buy a mini PC. Or better yet an old business desktop SFF PC if you don’t mind the size/power consumption.
There are a lot of alternatives to the Pi 5 right now – no need to reward those fucking scalpers.
Some people are reacting like they’re stopping support for these GPUs altogether. They’re putting Vega/Polaris on a slower update track, not completely stopping driver support.
I’d imagine that this saves them time when releasing new driver versions by reducing the number of GPUs to validate with every new release, since many of the newer driver features may not apply to the older GPUs anyway. On the flip side, they now have 2 driver packages to maintain instead of just one.
That said, it not good that they’re including Vega in this, given that those are still being sold, and as others have mentioned still being released until very recently.