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Comment by checkyoursudo | Hacker News Reader

I cannot buy a Pi 4 (8GB) locally at all. Amazon appears to offer one for 200-250 euros. For 200 euros or less, I can get a NUC-style mini PC at my local electronics store that is more powerful. I wouldn't mind trying out a Pi-as-a-PC, but new models either just aren't available or aren't reasonably priced.

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I use an old NUC with a i5-4250U CPU on an Akasa fanless case and it's pretty great.

One of the tricks is to run a very thin and simple stack to get really low latency. No compositor, no DE, just a WM and X. And Ethernet.

It copes with Google Meet or MS Teams just fine, as well as any light development. I do all heavy lifting by SSHing to a huge workstation.

There are lots of nice options if one wants to purchase a brand new fanless desktop: Cirrus7, Tranquil, CompuLab, etc. And of course, fancy DIY with e.g. a Streacom case.

In my case I use a NUC but with Gnome with Wayland , NixOS and a Xanmod kernel (multimedia/rt/input optimized throughput) with some blobs purged. No desktop effects.

On the netbook, OpenBSD with cwm+xterm+gnufont+tmux plus mpv,gv,mupdf,nsxiv and sometimes links -g and a forked dillo. On SSH, I don't care even if I use wireless: I use Mosh and the remote server it's handled either by Tmux or Screen.

The latency on both are comparable.

I bought a couple of Odroid HC4. I boot from a microSD. I can plug my old SATA disks in there. The board with an old 750 HDD consumes 12 to 15 W. If I unmount the HDD file system and switch off the disk with udisksctl power-off it's only 4 W. Any operation on the device turns the disk on again. I'll check with a spare SSD.

Even if I had a different use case Pis are impossible to find at a price worth paying for. I'm starting to forget about them.

A quick google search shows raspberry pi 4 8gb ram selling at 140 eur in italy, 100 eur in hungary. If you live in the eu why do you limit your searches to one country? It feels like those people complaining they cant find ps5s or gpus yet i comfortably sourced mine from various countries, new, at a decent price, even during the pandemic. If you own a small ltd you can even buy them vat free.

Is it actually in stock at this price? Where I am, local price tracker, tweakers.net, also shows some listings for ~100 euro, but if you click through to the seller's website, it says there "not in stock, delivery date unknown". If you limit to what you can actually buy, it's ~200 euros, and even that - often with a week or two of lead-time.

I’ve noticed listings like that more and more lately. A dark pattern where you initially think something is in stock but is actually sold by a third party of a third party.

Galagomarket seems to have the RPi 4B 8GB in stock for 99€. Don't know where they ship, but the website is translated into Croation, English, German, Italian, Serbian, Hungarian, Slovenian and Slovakian. I bought from them in Feb 2021 and got mine delivered quickly.

https://www.galagomarket.com//item/display/1953

Thanks for the link - i love this kind of small shops selling hobby electronics. I dont see an indication that they dont ship in all of the eu, at least according to their tocs. Seems like sending to outside slovenia costs 5 eur, peanuts. What i do usually is i just email them beforehand to be sure - a good test of their responsiveness as well.

This! Its why I love using geizhals, you can select to show all sellers from not just your own country but all of EU,UK as well. And immediately filter for availability and shipping.

I bought a used nuc computer on eBay for less than $100 recently. It’s much more powerful than a pi. Used computers are some of the best bargains now.

Yeah I bought a used Lenovo M720q NUC style 6 core i5-8400T 16Gb Ram 512Gb NVMe machine for less than a new Pi 4 8Gb. With a windows 10 pro license. Makes one hell of a home server.

at de.farnell.com it costs EUR 85 - but has over 1 year delivery time :-(

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