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.
Edit 2: Good to see that all the stupid parts of reddit made it here
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.
As for using old laptops that a big ehhh for me. Find yourself a used NUC instead.
Yes, but that costs money and I already have the laptop in my possession. Which is the majority reason why old laptops are used for this kind of thing.
Sure but that is a different premise than the post isn’t it? They explicitly talk about buying an old laptop.
Used NUCs don’t have built-in UPSs, like used laptops do.
Battery is the first thing to give and a 7 year old one as the post is on about is unlikely to have much use left as a UPS. But sure, in theory that’s nice but if you need UPS then buy a dedicated solution, since that’s actually reliable. If you don’t really need it then don’t buy laptops for that reason.
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.
Raspberry PIs got me into Linux, python, networking and a whole bunch more.
Now, that’s my job.PIs are great for tinkering or quick jobs, specifically if you need GPIO or GPIO related peripherals and networking/monitor.
For anything that needs a computer with an ethernet port (web serving, pihole, docker, whatever) then buy some cheap knock-off or refurbished low power device.
For anything that only needs the GPIO then get some MSP32.I’ve used PIs for doing crazy adapters between hardware and network. And they are awesome for that.
I’ve built a few projects that have also had a GUI. Also awesome for that.
But low powered PCs don’t have the native GPIO support at the same cost.
And a lot of the knock-offs don’t have the same library support. And certainly don’t have the Linux support.However, I made this decision a few years ago.
So, it’s possible that my opinion is now out dated, and competitors have really picked up.
It’s also easier for me to spend $100 knowing a pi will do it, as opposed to gambling (or spending more time/support time) on a more reasonably priced SBC.I’ve also found the Raspberry RP2040 to be a very good option for low-cost micro-controller development (also comes with optional Wi-Fi support, so can be used for ESP32-esque IoT based operations). The datasheet and board development documents are extremely detailed, and it is a first-class target for CircuitPython and Arduino-based development.
The programmable state machine / PIO functionality is a feature that particularly stands out to me. You get some of the functionality of the FPGA (albeit extremely limited by comparison to actual FPGAs) at a fraction of the cost.
I’d still consider them an overall force of good
Maybe rpi, but broadcom absolutely isn’t. They are one of the worst companies to work with in embedded.
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.
Friends! Mixed architectures are always exciting, I cannot wait for something as standardized as the Pi for RISC-V.
Thank you for your service!
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?
Not OP, but my Lenovo tiny computer on ebay is about $60 and will run circles around a raspberry pi
Power usage isn’t too much higher, it’s upgradeable, and it’s x86-64 architecture so more things are supported.
My tiny has an i7 and was a bit more expensive, but it’s a powerful little guy. I added more ram for a total of 32, and it does better than my “old” server (technically from same era).
Can’t speak for the other stuff.
Same with the HP elite desks, and don’t forget you can get off lease Chromebooks with much better specs than pi for ~$60 as well
I have a few PIs already and like them, but if I was doing a system today I’d probably go with the HP Elite Desk (800 Gen 2 or 3 perhaps), sourced as an ex-gov unit which can be had very cheap. The PIs have gotten expensive enough that they’re basically price equivalent once you add a case and possibly an SSD to it, at least locally. Have used those HP systems at work and they’re decent little boxes.
The caveat is that I’m not too fussed if I’m drawing extra power, as long as the performance justifies it. If power was a primary concern then the PI may still win out. I’m also not going to need to consider size in anything I do, and then then the micro PC form factors aren’t massive.
Yeah, choosing between the two definitely isn’t a black and white situation. I still use my pi’s for a lot of things, and power is definitely a factor. Neatness is also a factor as well. Having a project where you need an SATA or m.2 drive especially as buying an enclosed case alone for that is gonna cost $40 at least and you have to give up a USB 3 port to do so. Again though not every project needs that and a lot of projects like a pihole or emulation box can function just fine with SD.
The EliteDesks are nice, but beware top venting if you’re planning to stack them vertically
Yeah if someone is planning to stack I would definitely suggest they make sure they aren’t buying the top venting models
facts, at this point you are paying for size, gpio and the fact that its a form factor with industrial grade options easily available. not really as useful for a hobbyist at the price though.
For projects I prefer an ESP32 unless it needs a fancy GUI.
Any ESP32 you would recommend with easy wired networking (like DHCP client), easy language (python, node, c#. Tbh these are just the ones I know), easy IDE, and a bunch of libraries (like OSC, WebSockets, mqtt, rabbitmq, as well as stuff for various GPIO stuff)?
I’ve gone down a street of node-red on a raspberry pi, and I find it really easy to make complex things.
But 90% of my stuff is node->JS function->node. And I feel like I could do better!
Do you run Windows on yours, or have you installed a different OS to run things?
Not op but I have 3 tiny PCs and I run Linux on them. But then I don’t run windows at all because it honestly sucks.
Windows is pretty great though
for what…? Stealing your data, sending telemetry about how your kids play minecraft, serving up Ad’s in your start menu, forcing updates that reset your configured preference, overriding group policies, abusive licensing, trying to shove bing and edge down your throat?
No just overall experience. Everything runs better on Windows really. Anonymous usage shit doesn’t matter to me really. As for anything I need to do Windows just does it better, I don’t run into weird driver issues or update problems that cause things to crash miserably or lock me out of my boot sector with obscure errors I have to spend forever troubleshooting through a rabbit hole of forum posts and obscure nonsense. All the software I would ever need to use works fine including all the obscure stuff I have to use for work that I otherwise spend forever troubleshooting in arch, Ubuntu, mint, etc. Using wine, proton, or etc. It just works. I could plug any USB device in on Windows and get a little pop-up that says “you dude your shits ready to roll” and it’s good. I used Linux for 15 years or so on and off and I was vehemently pro Linux like you are but dude it really does suck. Only way it works is if someone develops a distro with exacting, specific hardware in mind and tests it for a good couple years then releases it for others to use with the exact same hardware. Cases like Chromebooks, steam decks, Enterprise mainframes and servers. Yeah, that’s fine, someone is putting in the time and effort to build specifically for this things. As for everything else, if you want shit to work and get your day to day work done as a grown up, not a great situation unless you somehow hit some sweetspot of hardware config that will supported. Otherwise most of your computing time is gonna be spent getting your computer actually functional
The primary reason I have to fiddle with things in linux is because I want to do things that really are not possible in windows. I still have to use Windows for work because I am tied to specific software and in these cases I have no other choice.
But I find I spend equal time fixing and supporting my windows machine as I do with linux. There are lots of valid complaints about linux and I have my own, the biggest is on Manjaro which I run for my daily it frequently has expired keys and updates just stop running correctly and the error messages are just bad.
I personally hit the tipping point with windows on windows 10. Initially I loved it, and it seemed like a good upgrade from windows 7 which I had previously been using. But then Microsoft started forcing anti user features. I decided that rather than have to spend time after EVERY FORCED update hunting down the settings and registry hacks that had been changed again to what I expressly wanted.
I personally see the value of Windows, but I would just disagree with it having a better experience. The experience is equally frustrating and the biggest thing holding people back is that they are used to the frustrations and dont think of them as being as significant as they are.
I run proxmox on bare metal. I have a couple VMs for docker, and video game servers.
If you don’t want to be replacing sdcards every two weeks, you’ll need to add a hard drive with an enclosure which will also need power. You’ll also need an upgraded power supply for the pi. To deal with any sort of scale, you’ll need more than one in a swarm. If you don’t want them just out in the open air, you’ll either need to coat them or put them in cases. It just all adds up to way more than a $5 ebay laptop with a broken screen that has 20x the performance.
I have an SSD connected to mine which doesn’t need external power and runs fine off the “official” power adapter. The case I have isn’t the greatest (two pieces of acrylic and some stand-offs lol), but it costed 50p and gets the job done.
As for scale, you’re beyond a Pi at that point.
I had the same, but it got corrupted eventually. It seemed it was working fine, but it was impossible to complete smartctl test. I believe that rpi cant handle peak power draw every SSD. That SSD was running fine for 3-4 months and before that I had one running for 2-3 years. I feel like its kinda random and depends on your luck
Don’t buy garage SD cards. I have cards that have been in use for years.
Dang I gotta stop getting my cards from garages?
Yes, a little research shows there’s a lot less breakdown with certain brands while using the pi, like Sandisk. You only get Kensington’s at garage sales.
if you don’t want to be replacing sd cards
The truth hurts, but this is the truth. Clawing at those little shits is the most annoying thing ever.
I’ve heard log2ram can make the SD cards last much longer, I usually just make it read only though.
Why would people use SD cards when they can use USB SSD’s?
Because SD cards come with the Pi by default
Really? I thought the NOOBS SD card was sold separately. At least it was with my multiple Pi3’s and 4’s. Maybe it’s a regional thing.
I think you still need a SD card, and that looks like workaround and not the way its made. Also USB doesnt have enough power for disk so you need external psu or powered hdd case. I was using 1 SSD from USB and it was working, but it was struggling and system got corrupted eventually
I use my pi for Pi-hole and pivpn. Any other server I spin up is typically on an old laptop.
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.
Yes, running pi-hole on a RP3b and it works great! Have been running it 24/7 with Raspbian and the same SD card for over 5 years.
Yes, agreed…running pi-hole on a RP3b and it works great! Have been running it 24/with Raspbian and the same SD card for over 5 years.
The source is the blowup that happened on mastodon when they hired an ex-cop who did illegal shit with raspberry pis
Source though?
I am not OP but since they didn’t provide any I went and found some
#1 https://www.makeuseof.com/raspberry-pi-hires-former-police-officer-for-surveillance-tech/?newsletter_popup=1 #2 https://raspberrypi.social/@Raspberry_Pi/109476972427437410 #3 https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/meet-raspberry-pis-maker-in-residence-toby-roberts/
Personally, I think this is a case of people trying to make the policing issue in the USA a global one. While I acknowledge that many countries, including mine, have problems with policing, I don’t believe it is highly controversial to consider hiring someone with a background in law enforcement.
I mean, maybe it’s because I’m not overly paranoid or live in the US, but this doesn’t seem like a big deal at all.
As for the “drama” of them telling someone they can unfollow, it’s true. It’s again, not a big deal.
This screams people trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.
It seems a bit like:
“You hired a cop!”
“Ok, So?”
“Fire them!”
“No…?”
“FASCISTS!”
I’m not a fan of cops either but this just seems really silly.
Yes, agreed…running pi-hole on a RP3b and it works great! Have been running it 24/with Raspbian and the same SD card for over 5 years.
🤓🤓🤓
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Because you’re looking? I guess I don’t understand the question.
edit: lol wtf happened
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.
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.
Pihole runs way better on PCs, though. I’ve also found that I prefer Adguard in docker beckended by nextdns more than anything else I’ve tried.
Euuhh what? I used to use an old pc but found out I could save about NZ$100 per year on power by switching to an RPi4. It hosts about 15 things, like sonarr, radarr, home assistant, pi hole, nzbget, photoview, Frigate, and backups, without any issues. Yes it’s not super power full but it’s perfect for me.
You cant beat rpi with power usage, but PC can draw <10W on idle. Well my server is more like 20-25W, but thats 25ish € a year here. Rpi would be 5-10 € a year. I pay around 0.12 €/kwh in Croatia
What OS are you using with your RP4to host all that?
Pretty sure you can use the standard raspberry pi os and run all those apps with docker or k3s
Yep, correct. I had to set some cpu limits to make sure pihole stays responsive.
Just standard raspberry headless os. Everything running in containers except pi hole.
I’ve installed a heat sink and a fan, triggered at 70c. Also have set some cpu docker limits on eg frigate and nzbget to ensure it doesn’t take the rest down.
But it performs surprisingly well. Load is 1 on average, goes up a bit when eg motion is detected, an nzb is parred/extracted, or photoview is indexing stuff.
Also recently added Paperless. Set everything to minimum, eg one document at a time.
I didn’t say that raspberry pis are nonfunctional.
You cant beat rpi with power usage, but PC can draw <10W on idle. Well my server is more like 20-25W, but thats 25ish € a year here. Rpi would be 5-10 € a year. I pay around 0.12 €/kwh in Croatia. If you can save 100 nz$ you have hungry PC or your electricity is not cheap at all :)
I’ll need to get some links on any of this. But I generally use VM’s or VPS my self.
Links? OP is sharing their experience and expressing an opinion. What do you want links for?
Expression of an opinion is starting a sentence with “I think that x…”
OP wasn’t expressing an opinion but stating items that I wanted to get examples of.
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?
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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
Do you have some source for that?
I can’t see an old laptop running 24/7 as being close to a raspberry pi performing the same tasks.
P=V x I
65W ≠ 5V x 2A
An RPi doesn’t max out a 2A 5V power supply unless its under heavy load. Idle is closer to half an amp.
If you’re hosting a server, you’re not going to get much idle time.
What about a web server or a file server? Both are very much on-demand, so they’re chock full of idle time. Even NextCloud has a ton of idle time.
Edit: As an aside, I love your profile pic, it’s a cool wizard :)
Thank you! A tiktok follower who is a tattoo artist surprised me with a drawing of me with some toads and I’ve loved it more with each passing day
Heavily depends on the server, a game server sure, for almost anything else you’re probably doing it wrong.
Ok
I had some good experience with the pine64 boards!
Oh never looked into those, thanks!
I wanted to get something to use as a NAS server and/or a pi-hole.
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!
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 🤷🏻♂️
You can use a thin client PC, which is usually uses <10 watt. Pi is even lower though, usually <5 watt.
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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
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.
I tried one ~5-10 years ago and the idea was good but it didn’t have nearly the level of support that Raspis have.
Do you mean hardware-wise, or software?
A little bit of both IIRC.
It used a different chipset than the raspberry so it needed a tweaked version of Raspbian to run but the drivers weren’t great and the repos were missing a lot of stuff/outdated.
Ah thanks!
Yeah that’s gonna be tricky for me then… I really don’t like to deal with driver headaches.
I’ve definitely also had the experience of dodgy hardware support (in Armbian, which is all volunteer) with weird Chinese SBCs.
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.
I got an 1 gig Orange pi zero 2 with a 2 port USB expansion board. I got it from ali express with a 32gigabyte micro SD card, USB to USBC charging cable for like $40.
I 3d printed a case for it. Provisioned it with a heatsink, fan, 18W USB power supply, and a UPS.
I use it as an octoprint server, the extra USB ports go to a webcam and a fan if i feel like it. It’s been reliable but I’ve only had it a month. Transferring jobs is nearly instant plugged into gigabit ethernet. Transfer is via API key not web interface. Seems to do alright in the CPU department. It has to parse some of the larger jobs for a minute.
Prints perfectly. Only had one resent packet USB packet so far. After it prints rendering out 1080P time-lapses was slow. It would hit like 70% cpu usage and take hours. Rendering out 1080P octolapses with fewer frames and less movement would hit 98% cpu use but be done very fast - like 10 min.
They just announced an orange pi zero 3 with a similar form factor (but not exactly the same) and larger faster memory.
You seem to have conveniently left out power consumption.
Exactly. Thus, even a rpi 4 w/ 2 GiB is serviceable enough as is if you know what you are doing.
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.
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.
