I have been trying to get to grips with a Raspberry Pi donated by my son, who happened to find he was in possession of two, and did not think to start his own linux cluster. His loss is my gain.
There is something rewarding about getting back to basics with a lightweight, readily programmable computer rather than the over-engineered, application-heavy, wading-through-mud-with-leaky-wellingtons product that the modern Windows PC has become. Clearly, the Pi has the slight disadvantage that you have to take a few minutes attaching it to a television screen and keyboard and ethernet connection so that your living room becomes a spider's web of criss-crossed cables, which somehow takes the spontaneity out of things, and risks throttling any visitors who inadvertently stray into the room, but at least it comes with a giant red raspberry on its desktop. And I am sure, if you made the effort, you could write programs to run on a PC, but they would look small and shabby compared to the glossy titles you are used to. Whereas on the Pi, the home-made look and feel of your code is perfectly acceptable, because it is, after all, home made.
Many years ago, before the IBM PC became a feature of every household, I owned an Atari ST and wrote simple programs on it. These typically featured lines bouncing around inside a box, which doesn't sound particularly entertaining, but became rewarding when you had actually put together the code yourself. There was also a game where you flew a spaceship around blowing up asteroids, which demonstrated what could be achieved with a little more effort.
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