Not sure if rpis are that relevant as of now when there are so many other, usually more performant and overall compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree.
That said "you do you" and if you want to (poorly) run a bunch of stuff on a half-dozen Rasperry Pis (or whatever) then more power to you.
On the flipside of this, the wide ranging and very robust Raspberry Pi ecosystem kicked off a surge of people self hosting all kinds of applications and getting people to leave cloud services. For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that.
I'm glad that with the shortage people were forced to re-evaluate some of these approaches and projects to realize things like "Oh, this $100 used Intel XYZ is 20x faster and still low power enough to not mean anything".
With the launch of Willow and the Willow Inference Server I'm learning a lot about how people self-host and the variety is staggering. We see everything from "Well I run ABC on Pi 1, DEF on Pi 2, GHI on an old mac mini, and XYZ on an Intel NUC" to single Raspberry Pis to extremely complex Proxmox configurations. I understand a lot of this self-hosting infra grew gradually over the years but needless to say a single, cheap, reasonably powered machine can do all of that and more.
The original home computing explosion didn't come about because of the power of those early platforms -- it was because the thrill of accomplishing something under the limitations of a popular platform is the reward early pioneers needed to keep going.
So yeah, the Pi is not ideal for so many use cases, but successfully arm-wrestling this well-known-but-limited platform into serving web traffic or doing something equally useful is why people keep using it.
How is this any different from self-hosting on any other hardware? Other than the admittedly fun and engaging aspect of putting the work in to string together a bunch of USB hubs, cabling, and SATA bridges, etc. I think a lot of that thrill comes from the challenges of pounding a square peg into a round hole along the journey.
Again, whatever works for you but it's been curious to watch it progress over the years.
Ditto for reading about projects -- it's great that Alice's Intel nuc can serve X pages per second, but it's easier to read and understand the technical feats of someone hacking off traces on a Pi 4 to expose PCIe because we all know the limits of the platform.
However, I'm primarily talking about x86_64 here and is has the broadest software support and biggest community of all.
After my transtition to an M1, now I can't stand any fan noise running on the background.
[1]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER....
[2]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detai...
If you want HDDs then a fan is a non-issue, the HDDs will drown out the fans.
I don't think this is a fair comparison. In principle, anyone could follow the hacky instructions for the Pi and complete the same project. In some cases (such as the PiHole), it might even be worthwhile.
If your instructions begin with "find a used thin client on eBay," however, then there's no guarantee that the subsequent instructions are useful. My thin terminal might not be the same as the author's, and the author certainly can't specify a single particular brand/model because the eBay stock is limited and changeable.
"Mainstreaming" a hobby project needs the standardization at least as much as it needs the performance, and the Raspberry Pi's ecosystem remains an advantage. Ironically, this advantage is the same reason that the company prioritized business deliveries during the shortage, since business use depends even more critically on the stable, supported platform.
> For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that.
True.
> compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree.
But that degree matters. What SBC has the best upstream support these days? Orange? Banana? Pine? I honestly don't know, despite taking a casual interest. Also, upstream and driver support gets worse if you need a newer chipset, to support features like 4k or H.265 or USB PD or 2.5GbE. To be fair, Raspberry Pi doesn't offer the latter.
It doesn't hurt that the OS is a very well-supported Debian derivative, but the uniformity of the ecosystem is a massive benefit you don't really get anywhere else.
I think their scarcity has made us all appreciate what having consistent low-power SBC platforms with convenient programmable interfaces is. I found uses for every Pi 0/2/3/4 I had that had been sitting disused because I was too excited to move to 4s when I really didn't need more power.
I don't necessarily agree with that, but it is a pretty great starting point. The competition has a very long way to go to be comparable. Performance is also seldom the limiting factor.
Personally I switched pihole and a few other servixes to a docker container on a USFF pc. Still using a pi4 for retro games
Could I spend more for a better board like the RK3588 boards? Sure, I have a Rock5B and Orange Pi 5. But I don't want to spend more for performance I don't need.
What is your suggested favorite replacement? All the less that I’ve looked into are either just as hard to get and expensive or are discontinued before they gain ground. Happy to consider other options.