GENEROUS COMMUNITY
The Pi Community is one of the Pi’s killer features. Aside from the price and technology, the knowledge that if/when your Googling fails you, there’s likely to be someone who’ll be happy to drop a hint, is invaluable.
When I started working on picamera (naively assuming it would wind up a minor Python library for trivial camera usage), it was the community responding enthusiastically to the early releases that spurred me on to take the library further than I’d planned. Later, it was advice from the camera firmware devs (again via the community) that helped me conjure the more advanced features in that library. Most of picamera (or my other projects, like picraft or pisense) wouldn’t exist without the aid or support from this community.
Having an active and friendly community has been a major part of Ubuntu’s success story too. Years before joining Canonical, I’d switched to Ubuntu as my primary OS, and the community surrounding it was a big part of that decision. Ultimately though, community implies an ecosystem to me: something with mutually beneficial feedback loops (albeit with some outside support, whether that’s the Pi Foundation or Canonical nurturing their nascent communities).
One of my great pleasures is fixing something locally in Ubuntu, realising it’s generic (something that will affect other distros too) and, without additional bureaucracy, knowing I can feed that back upstream. It makes all Pi user’s lives a bit better, and my life a bit easier too.