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Comment by vital101 | Hacker News Reader

Are there any Raspberry Pi competitors that people like? I've see a few referenced in different articles but I don't have any idea how reliable or useful they are.

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That will depend on what your project requires. There are a large number of Pi users that could get by with a simple x86 desktop-class PC or thin client [1] which, as the article points out, can have pretty similar wattage and compute power compared to say running 3-4 Pis.

It gets a little tricky when you start talking about GPIO requirements. There are things like the ASUS tinkerboard [2] but it's much more expensive than a Pi.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/used-thin-client-pcs...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WPVVZNH

Power usage is the problem. Running a machine that uses 10x more power to accomplish same task that a Pi could is an issue.

To clarify, yes it takes more power than a single Pi. But for any projects where someone would be running _multiple_ Pi's, then the power usage is close if not equal. These machines are able to run the workload of 3-5 Pi's with roughly equal power budgets of 3-5 Pi's.

There are a number of machines using 5800u @ 15W. That's hardly 10x more power. They are only slightly bigger but offer a quite a bit more performance, let alone features.

That said, what am I talking about costs about 500. There's some overlap but it's not exactly the same market.

15W for the whole system or just the AMD 5800U CPU?

The boards from Libre Computer are great because they work with mainline Linux and EFI, meaning you can boot any distro, be it Fedora, Debian etc. and directly use the latest distro kernels. You don't need a special image e.g. with a bootloader setup or some custom kernel that gets outdated quickly and never updated. It's really great to be able to not worry about the OS and kernel updates because you can follow what you would also do on your laptop or x86 server.

https://libre.computer/products/

I'm having success with Orange Pi One using Armbian to build images. Not going to be as performant as a Pi 4 by any stretch but at $25 a pop I can't complain

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