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Comment by liendolucas | Hacker News Reader

The lesson I've learned over the years of purchasing several Raspberry Pi's is this: Unless you're in the need to integrate a project through the GPIO's interface I would be better off spending on one of those (second hand) mini-pcs by lenovo, dell, etc. Even if you want to use it for a low budget mini server, performance for the buck is way better off with a mini pc.

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For GPIO on mini PC you can use USB-GPIO adapter. Under Linux it can be used like native Raspberry's GPIOs.

Raspberry is great when one learns or needs a typical, embedded platform. I'm using Raspberry to learn about Kernel, drivers, bootloaders, etc., but I wouldn't use it as my local server/home automation computer. For this, I have a second-hand HP T630 that I bought for $46, and works great.

How does Raspberry teach anything about bootloaders? It's probably unique, it functions completely different compared to all other bootloaders and it's closed source.

I totally concur.

I migrated most of my self-hosted services from multiple rpi (I've been using several of them for years) to a single cheap Intel N100 NUC that I purchased last year: 16GB RAM/512Gb SSD for 156€, and I've been very pleased with it.

You lose some resilience when you do that - if the NUC fails then you lose everything. Whereas if you distribute your services across multiple rpis then a failure of one rpi is not catastrophic.

Which also applies if you use two NUCs and setup failover between them.

The current (expensive) RPi is almost never the right choice. For IoT you have Espressif boards and for higher performance you have mini PCs. The main advantage of RPi was its cost, that's why it got popular. Now that the main factor is gone, the rest like the ecosystem etc. is not that important anymore.

I thought the same and ended up with a gigabyte BRIX now collecting dust, because there is no way to convince that UEFI, besides USB ports, that SATA and M2 SSD drives are thing, one year of wasted effort, because I wanted to be clever instead of getting a Pi.

Also the place where I acquired it no longer exists, hence why I got stuck with it.

Yes I should have known better, but it is as it is, and we learn from our mistakes.

Did you try setting the BIOS...err UEFI to something like 'Win7 mode' for booting and update the BIOS ...err firmware/UEFI from USB?

Or need low power, ARM, small form factor, GPIO, or ability to load your software to a compute module.

Yes, those are of course valid points as well. However you also need to consider that you have to spend money on other things as well: the power adapter & the SD card to at least have a bare minimum (and a case maybe if you are not a careful person with electronic stuff).

Two things that actually annoy me is that SD cards are way way slower than other storage options and are very prone to corruption, I've lost not critical data, but data that was still useful to me due to SD cards (even I believe if you purchase them from a known manufacturer). So this implies that you will likely want to have another more reliable storage option to keep critical data backed up (more spending). And the other one is the missing power button. I don't know if that has changed but all the models that I own lack of a power switch button.

I agree it would be ideal to have a mini m2 slot, sata port or similar. You can at least now buy HATs.

Lets be honest many people will have old/spare/extra phone/laptop chargers that they can use to power a Pi. SD cards are cheap, a few dollars.

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