The 20 most-read stories of 2024 on Ars Technica

The Raspberry Pi 5 inside its official case.

Credit:
Andrew Cunningham

We read about Andrew’s experience with a pair of sub-$200 desktop PCs, but this story is what started it all. The spec sheet looked promising enough, with support for two 4K displays running at 60 Hz and space for an internal PCIe SSD, but the experience was not what he’d hoped.

Andrew’s time using the Raspberry Pi 5 as his daily driver started out disappointing, but once he reset his expectations, he ended up pleasantly surprised by the experience.

If you’re looking for the cheapest mini desktop PC possible, you’ll want to look elsewhere, but if you want to see how far along Arm Linux has come, read Andrew’s article.

The STS-51-B mission begins with the liftoff of the Challenger from Pad 39A in April 1985.

Credit:
NASA

Being strapped into a small space and thundered into space aboard a giant rocket has to be an incredibly stressful experience. But sometimes the stress doesn’t end with a successful launch. We don’t often get to peer behind the curtains and get a glimpse of the mental state of an astronaut, so when we do, it’s jarring.

“Hey, if you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not going back,” said astronaut Taylor Wang during a Space Shuttle mission in 1985. The first Chinese-born person in space, Wang was heading up an experiment on the behavior of liquid droplets in microgravity. When it didn’t work at the outset, Wang asked permission to troubleshoot it and make repairs. When Mission Control denied his request, he uttered that chilling sentence.

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch.

Credit:
United Launch Alliance

Not only has there been a lot of Boeing on this top 20 list, there has been a lot of Boeing in the news all year. And most of that news has been bad.

Eric Berger dives deep into the development of Starliner, outlining the problems and setbacks that plagued its development, trying to answer the big question of how a company like Boeing, which had been at the acme of crewed spaceflight for decades, fell so far behind competition that didn’t even exist 20 years ago?

Thank you for making Ars a daily read during 2024. May you and those you love have a happy and safe holiday season.