The 20 Most Read Stories of 2024 on Ars Technica

We’ve read about Andrew’s experience with a pair of sub-$200 desktop PCs, but this story is where it all started. The spec sheet looked promising, with support for dual 4K displays at 60Hz and room for an internal PCIe SSD, but the experience didn’t live up to its expectations.

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

If you’re looking for the cheapest mini desktop PC, you may want to look elsewhere. However, if you want to see how far Arm Linux has come, check out Andrew’s article.

Being strapped into a confined space and flying into space aboard a giant rocket must be an incredibly stressful experience. But sometimes the stress doesn’t end with a successful start. It’s not often that we get a behind-the-scenes look and a glimpse into an astronaut’s mental state. When we do that, it is disturbing.

“Hey, if you don’t give me a chance to fix my instrument, I’m not going back,” said astronaut Taylor Wang during a space shuttle mission in 1985. Wang was the first Chinese-born person in space to conduct an experiment Perform behavior of liquid droplets in weightlessness. When it initially didn’t work, Wang asked for permission to troubleshoot and make repairs. When Mission Control rejected his request, he said this chilling sentence.

Not only was there a lot of Boeing on this top 20 list, there was also a lot about Boeing in the news all year long. And most of that news was bad.

Eric Berger delves deep into Starliner’s development, outlining the problems and setbacks that plagued its development, and attempting to answer the big question of how a company like Boeing, which was at the forefront of human spaceflight for decades, ended up so far behind lagging behind the competition that didn’t even exist 20 years ago?

Thank you for making Ars a daily read in 2024. May you and your loved ones have a happy and safe holiday season.