If you want to host something on a Raspberry Pi, you should consider using literally any other piece of hardware

I love to hate claims like this. it’s like a fart, but ends up being a shart. No truth in the source and unjustified noise and grumbles that leaves a mess and confuses people for no reason.

Do yourself a favor, either cite links that legitimize your claims or just sign off, you’re hangry.

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?

They're assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base.

You got receipts for such a strong claim?

Euuhh what? I used to use an old pc but found out I could save about NZ$100 per year on power by switching to an RPi4. It hosts about 15 things, like sonarr, radarr, home assistant, pi hole, nzbget, photoview, Frigate, and backups, without any issues. Yes it's not super power full but it's perfect for me.

Can you expand on some of this?

I haven't really heard much regarding them being bad to their community/customer base, though I haven't bought in a few years.

In regards to cost/performance, what are you meaning you'd need to spend extra on to match that of an old laptop or recycled machine?

This post seems like it's more about OP having an ideological axe to grind with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Which is fine - they (and Broadcom, by extension) have made a few tactical errors in the past.

I'd still consider them an overall force of good, especially when the majority of the low-cost SBC market appears to be saturated with Rockchip-based boards with little to no support for mainline Linux.

The arguments about power usage and software compatibility seem to be a bit disingenuous, however. Except for low-power Intel Atom/Ryzen Embedded offerings, vast majority of x86(_x64) platforms are going to consume a lot more power for roughly equivalent performance as more recent ARM counterparts. Most common self-hosted services usually do have ARM binary/image distributions.

While I completely agree with you on the asshole part, you also have to factor in that right now the Pi still remains the most dominant hardware in that category. Furthermore, I think you're missing the point of what makes a hobby... a hobby.

There's plenty of stuff that maybe I don't want to self host on the same device and that I would rather host on RPI due to power consumption for example. Not all about money and recycling old computers, but regarding ecology also spending less energy it's extremely important. Imagine a full desktop computer just to host pihole + pivpn. Sorry but your statement is pretty bias.

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.

Citation needed, Pi's are just a single member of the broader SBC market. They are great for a lot of projects, especially for beginners who are their primary market, or those unfamiliar with Linux systems.

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.

Citation needed, currently for what I use my Pi's for, they are massive overkill. A laptop has WAY more breakable, and less repairable parts. A pi is a SBC, nothing I don't need. I don't want a screen, I don't want a keyboard, I don't want an ancient battery that is probably bloated from being plugged in all the time, and I absolutely do not want a fan. Honestly the Pi zero is overkill for most of my stuff, I just do actually want a wired network port. Your measure of "competitive" is extremely flawed, because you assume the only thing a Pi is useful for is it's raw number crunching power when that's not at all what they are marketed towards. In all honesty, I'd love to see a laptop that was even 50% as good a a Pi, but for that weight and size you're looking almost entirely at used phones, whose OS is significantly more locked down. Can't exactly run Docker on Android, let alone dealing with running servers over wifi.

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.

How could I mount a laptop to my garage door for presence detection of which car is coming and going? Would be kind of an eyesore wouldn't you think, without even mentioning the weight problems. Laptops are massive compared to a Pi. For your point on ARM specifically, that's a feature my friend. Alternative cpu architectures are pretty interesting, and I personally have been an avid RISC-V follower for years now, and am absolutely thrilled to bits waiting for a standardized RV solution like the Pi. How lucky of you to just be given everything for free, thanks for taking e-waste out of the landfills for a little while I guess. Most of us have to buy the products we use, maybe getting something from a friend once in a while.

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.

What do you recommend instead?

I use mine for my pihole and have been pretty happy. $40 bucks, tiny footprint and power consumption. I have a 3 from 2018. I get where your coming from but gonna need some sauce for your claims.

If I need something more powerful for stuff like my Minecraft server I use an old laptop running Fedora, but my pi 4 works great as a super low profile, low power, stable http and ssh server.

What's this stuff about the pi foundation being assholes though, can someone fill me in?

and won’t bind you to ARM architecture

Just wait when people start self-hosting stuff in RISC-V machines lol

X86_64 being a duopoly is a worse scenario. So, I'm happy to fight in the middle of software poorly tested in different architectures.

What if I care about power draw? Should I go for alternatives? BananaPi, OrangePi and so on?

With super high relative power consumption, sure.

Also nothing much wrong with ARM.

What a spectacularly ironic post OP. You make an incredible claim while providing zero proof. Can you see how that makes you the asshole, talking shit about RPi foundation? On top of that you edited your post to call us all stupid for calling you out. Incredible.

The moderator team will take this as a learning opportunity. We don't have any rules for this community specific to rudeness or insults. This post was fine as an opinion piece until Edit 2. For this reason, I'm locking the post. Additionally, we'll be updated the community rules on the Sidebar shortly.

I'll need to get some links on any of this. But I generally use VM's or VPS my self.

I've been using Pi 4 since 2019 and it's helped me manage stuff through the pandemic. I also overall agree with this post since I've spent many many hours diagnosing issues with the Pi that otherwise would not have happened on other mini PCs.

That said, there really isn't a market for mini PCs in my region so this is what I'm stuck with for the foreseeable future.

I do agree that stuff like the RPi 4 is in a weird spot where it's too weak for a lot of things but also too expensive for the light stuff. The biggest gripes I have are the SD cards which makes data intensive tasks impossible/expensive and overall makes it so you need to think about not causing to much writing. That and how hard they are to place. Large enough to be ugly and in the way but small so they're awkward to find a good spot for.

However I think the RPi zeroes are amazing for building small but intelligent sensors like picking up when a specific bluetooth device enters a room or a small microphone to create a relay point for a voice assistant. They're super easy to program since they still run basic Linux compared to other alternatives that are more efficient sure and some even cheaper but require you to access them via COM or learn much more machine close coding. Which puts up a massive hurdle for prototyping and playing around with the possibilities.

As for using old laptops that a big ehhh for me. Find yourself a used NUC instead. Much better form factor and the same power or even better. Though if they dont need to be visible then I really do prefer a small desktop, then it can have decent fans and hold hard drives. Everybody needs a NAS right? And building one yourself is easy and they make for excellent home servers too.

If anyone is looking for ARM SBC alternatives since Raspberry Pis are so expensive:

1. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078RT6H8X/
2. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074P6BNGZ/
3. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BFVFF3FV/

Do note that if you are doing any IOT/anything with the pin inputs/outputs of an SBC, you're going to have to match the pins/change some config in your code to make it work with these boards. It shouldn't be too hard, it's an SBC after all, but compatibility issues arise all the same.

Cheers

I've been testing some alternative SBCs like the OrangePi 5.

Currently mine is a fallback DNS server and reverse proxy for my network, trying to come up with some other uses for it.

They're still low power ARM boxes, but they're much cheaper than the RPi is at the moment.

In lieu of a better source I found this BuzzFeed News article with the Google search "Raspberry pi mastodon controversy". Though I admit I had no idea what op might be talking about until this moment. Some zingers by BF in there though:

She added, “I don’t think any of the people complaining here would not call the police if their house was burgled.” When BuzzFeed News pointed out that police don’t surveil burglars, Upton agreed that’s true.

Class.

I recently moved off a combination of Pi 4 and an old netbook to the ODroid H3+. Orders of magnitude faster while having socketed storage and RAM. The best part is the NVME and SATA ports that let me attach 41TB of raw storage and add a data warehousing nature to my setup. 10/10 would buy again.

Unless you already have it, to be honest

I use my pi for Pi-hole and pivpn. Any other server I spin up is typically on an old laptop.

I always wanted one, but it is hard to justify since I use my NAS for everything... I'd use it a second pihole though.

Old thin clients are worth looking at as rpi replacements. I have one as a (2D) print sever, for a printer that only has windows drivers.

The only real advantage rpi has these days is the amount of stuff that's prepacked as OS images for them. Technically speaking other SBC usually have a better price/performance ratio.

I love little ARM SBCs but my self-hosting journey accelerated drastically when I gave in and started using 8yo x86 hardware instead.

A couple rounds of upgrades later and I can also see how much more compute/$ one gets out of x86 as well. Even relatively recent PC hadware is absolutely dirt cheap used.

Are other single board computers like OragnePI or Libre Computer any better?

Anytime I start with a Pi, I end up getting frustrated with the performance and just virtualize it on x86.

I will argue from experience that Homeassistant runs pretty damn good on a pi using an SSD. They have an image specifically for HA as well.

🤓🤓🤓