There are a lot of reasons not to give them your money. They’re assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base. That’s beside the point, though, really.

It’s just not a spectacular option for hosting. In order to get a Rpi competitive with even the shittiest laptop from 7 years ago, you’re going to end up spending more than you would spend on a decent laptop from 7 years ago.

If it is a computer that turns on, it will likely function orders of magnitude better than an Rpi and won’t bind you to ARM architecture. My entire hosting setup was pulled out of a recycling pile for free. Install ubuntu/ubuntu server and enjoy yourself.

If you intend on spending any amount of money on this hobby, I cannot express enough how much I recommend against any of that money going toward a Raspberry Pi.

EDIT: A lot of you seem to be reading this as “Raspberry Pis are all nonfunctional” and getting mad about it. Don’t do that.

  • mim@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    You seem to have conveniently left out power consumption.

    I agree they are very pricey these days. Are there any competitiors that offer cheap low-power consumption computers?

    • cichy1173@szmer.info
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      1 year ago

      It will not be that great like on Raspberry Pi, but Mini PC are also very low on energy. For example,. Wyse 5070 with J5005 idles around 3-5 W, which is really great. i had HP 800 Mini G3 that idled ~7-8W. Mini PCs are more powerful, expandable and can use normal SSD Drive. For selfhosting they are better, but in some places Raspberry Pi (or alternative like Orange Pi) will be better, especially when you need something small and really low power

      • mim@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        I never heard of the orange pi!

        Some of the models are very cheap. Have you tried them? If they are as reliable, I might get myself one for a couple of projects.

        • cichy1173@szmer.info
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          1 year ago

          Yes. I have Orange Pi Zero 2 with 1 GB of RAM running Ubuntu. This is actually very powerful machine, more powerful than my Raspberry Pi 3B+. i bought it for about 180 polish zloty (around 40 euros). I use it for printing server with Ghostscript printer app installed via Snap. I also tried Wireguard and MongoDB - everything works fine. it works really well, but it sits around 50 C on CPU, so it can get hot.

    • Cosmic Frog@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, power consumption is never talked about enough when talking about that type of hardware. I do have an old PC I could use as a server, but I don’t need more heating at home. Mini-PCs are cool, but how cool are they?

      But anyway, I haven’t been able to buy a RPi at decent price in years, so 🤷🏻‍♂️

      • mim@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Oh never looked into those, thanks!

        I wanted to get something to use as a NAS server and/or a pi-hole.

        • 2KomponentenKuchen@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          Sure, yw :) There are also NAS cases for some of the SBCs, but I guess you can also go cheaper without a dedicated case and go with some icybox which allows you to connect some disks (jbod or RAID) via USB 3. So many possibilities!

    • Brad Ganley@toad.workOP
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      1 year ago

      You’d probably be shocked at how close a 65w supply charging a laptop battery at trickle voltages and a 2A 5v power supply maxed out 24/7 can come to each other