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Comment by shadowpho | Hacker News Reader

I lost interest in raspberry pi once I saw that it's $80 + $20 case + $30 SD card + $10 PSU = $140.... which is more expensive than a new n100 alder lake mini-pc.

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I thought the same thing but you are not comparing apples and apples.

If you say just price I would say pi ~$120, vs alder lake ~$190

But the most important thing the pi has is mindshare.

It is not better hardware-wise (beaglebone, banana pi, etc)

It is not better at general purpose computing or a nas or a desktop (any intel or amd machine is better)

But it is good education. You don't have to "install" linux, just put the sd card in and go.

You can learn hardware things. You can learn linux things. You have lots of company. Many people are using it at the hobby level (several million). Someone has done it and made a web page or youtube video.

This is honestly the thing that annoys me most about Raspberry Pis. They’ve taken what was (and still is) transferable knowledge on how to do things with Linux and made people think it’s some sort of Raspberry Pi magic.

The shear number of “how to run Nginx on a Raspberry Pi 4” tutorials blows my mind. Why not teach people to fish instead and show them how to apply the same process you would for any other Linux distribution? Who knows, maybe that’s a thing I should do.

I share your frustration but part of this has to be incremental to get people on-boarded and interested. Most people will search for Raspberry Pi, not Linux. Now, will those tutorials point out at the end, “Hey, this applies to most Linux distros, click here to learn more.”? Would be nice but probably not.

Also, in my old age and as a parent, I also search for the same. And I’m the kid that installed Slackware from floppies at 11. Could I figure out which commands to write into the current Debian distribution that Raspberry Pi uses? Definitely. But I have limited focus time with my kids. I’d love for him to learn the basics too, but that will come. At 5, I just need to wow him with all the cool things he can build. The details can come later.

That may be the title of the article for SEO purposes. But anyone who learns how to install nginx on raspberry pi will soon find out that their knowledge transfers to most Linux distro.

Most people don't want to learn to fish in their quest to make a seafood dinner.

Isn't it the job of Nginx to provide a distro-neutral installation document?

Note that the Pi 5 is $60 (4GB), the case is $10, a good microSD card is $10, and the PSU is $12. So total to get into the Pi 5 game is $92, not $140. All of those things besides the Pi 5 itself right now are in stock at my local computer store, so no shipping either ;)

And Pi 4 is a perfectly reasonable computer for many, many use cases still, and is available practically everywhere again.

> new n100 alder lake mini-pc.

I was curious

https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Lake-N100-Desktop-Computer-Et...

$199.00 shipped Prime

What does the performance of this CPU compare to Raspberry Pi 5 CPU?

500GB SSD + 16GB of RAM blows it out of the water, obviously...

Not sure how much of an advantage being amd64 vs aarch64/arm64 is these days but still worth calling out

And no pinouts on the n100 mini-pc. Not to mention the software ecosystem that is prepped and ready to go for the many special use cases of raspberry pis. At least the n100 is low power. Not as low as rapi, but not nearly as bad of a tradeoff as other, older mini PC options.

> no pinouts

If I needed them I'd consider adding a cheap ($6.50 on adafruit) USB to GPIO adapter (or a USB Arduino or rPi pico board.)

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

$14.95 before shipping and you have to solder the pins

Even better, if one n100 is out of stock, you can buy one from a different vendor and it will work fine. Good luck running your raspberry image on an orange pi.

The n100 will have a cooling solution so you can run it full speed forever. (As I do with both my N100s). edit: both mine have NVME disk connectors. I just swapped a crappy M2 SATA for a second hand NVME and it's about 2X the speed.

I've been excited about the possibility of having computational power around my home. A Pi would enable this, but so would a central computer connected to several thin clients, or even just NAS access, both of which being cheaper options. The Pi is pretty cool, but I'm finding less uses for it personally. It's still a nice device for embedded applications

PI is meant for embedded projects, like making a robot, where you need the camera input, the high-speed GPIO, the small power consumption and the formfactor.

If you just want a small 'normal' computer, that's not the point of pi

I love Pi, but I agree with you. I recently purchased some mini-pcs, i5-9th, 32gb, cheaply upped to 64... all off ebay for under $175, hard to argue... its only like 3-5sq inches larger too.

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