There are a lot of reasons not to give them your money. They’re assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base. That’s beside the point, though, really.

It’s just not a spectacular option for hosting. In order to get a Rpi competitive with even the shittiest laptop from 7 years ago, you’re going to end up spending more than you would spend on a decent laptop from 7 years ago.

If it is a computer that turns on, it will likely function orders of magnitude better than an Rpi and won’t bind you to ARM architecture. My entire hosting setup was pulled out of a recycling pile for free. Install ubuntu/ubuntu server and enjoy yourself.

If you intend on spending any amount of money on this hobby, I cannot express enough how much I recommend against any of that money going toward a Raspberry Pi.

EDIT: A lot of you seem to be reading this as “Raspberry Pis are all nonfunctional” and getting mad about it. Don’t do that.

Edit 2: Good to see that all the stupid parts of reddit made it here

  • Stupidmanager@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I love to hate claims like this. it’s like a fart, but ends up being a shart. No truth in the source and unjustified noise and grumbles that leaves a mess and confuses people for no reason.

    Do yourself a favor, either cite links that legitimize your claims or just sign off, you’re hangry.

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m just here to say that I’ve never heard any of the negative claims that OP makes from anyone else before.

      What I have seen and heard is that the RPi foundation doing a lot of good by providing low cost computers for educational use and anyone else who wants a good, small, and cheap computer.

      • Brad Ganley@toad.workOP
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        1 year ago

        Yes and, classically, if you specifically haven’t heard or looked into something, it’s not true so my bad

    • Brad Ganley@toad.workOP
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      It really doesn’t matter to me that much if you live the rest of your life being wrong. Google is free.

  • mim@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    You seem to have conveniently left out power consumption.

    I agree they are very pricey these days. Are there any competitiors that offer cheap low-power consumption computers?

    • Brad Ganley@toad.workOP
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      You’d probably be shocked at how close a 65w supply charging a laptop battery at trickle voltages and a 2A 5v power supply maxed out 24/7 can come to each other

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            1 year ago

            Heavily depends on the server, a game server sure, for almost anything else you’re probably doing it wrong.

          • moomoomoo309@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            What about a web server or a file server? Both are very much on-demand, so they’re chock full of idle time. Even NextCloud has a ton of idle time.

            Edit: As an aside, I love your profile pic, it’s a cool wizard :)

            • Brad Ganley@toad.workOP
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              1 year ago

              Thank you! A tiktok follower who is a tattoo artist surprised me with a drawing of me with some toads and I’ve loved it more with each passing day

  • HybridSarcasm@lemmy.worldM
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    The moderator team will take this as a learning opportunity. We don’t have any rules for this community specific to rudeness or insults. This post was fine as an opinion piece until Edit 2. For this reason, I’m locking the post. Additionally, we’ll be updated the community rules on the Sidebar shortly.

  • NickwithaC@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They’re assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base.

    You got receipts for such a strong claim?

  • whoami@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This post seems like it’s more about OP having an ideological axe to grind with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Which is fine - they (and Broadcom, by extension) have made a few tactical errors in the past.

    I’d still consider them an overall force of good, especially when the majority of the low-cost SBC market appears to be saturated with Rockchip-based boards with little to no support for mainline Linux.

    The arguments about power usage and software compatibility seem to be a bit disingenuous, however. Except for low-power Intel Atom/Ryzen Embedded offerings, vast majority of x86(_x64) platforms are going to consume a lot more power for roughly equivalent performance as more recent ARM counterparts. Most common self-hosted services usually do have ARM binary/image distributions.

    • towerful@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Raspberry PIs got me into Linux, python, networking and a whole bunch more.
      Now, that’s my job.

      PIs are great for tinkering or quick jobs, specifically if you need GPIO or GPIO related peripherals and networking/monitor.
      For anything that needs a computer with an ethernet port (web serving, pihole, docker, whatever) then buy some cheap knock-off or refurbished low power device.
      For anything that only needs the GPIO then get some MSP32.

      I’ve used PIs for doing crazy adapters between hardware and network. And they are awesome for that.
      I’ve built a few projects that have also had a GUI. Also awesome for that.
      But low powered PCs don’t have the native GPIO support at the same cost.
      And a lot of the knock-offs don’t have the same library support. And certainly don’t have the Linux support.

      However, I made this decision a few years ago.
      So, it’s possible that my opinion is now out dated, and competitors have really picked up.
      It’s also easier for me to spend $100 knowing a pi will do it, as opposed to gambling (or spending more time/support time) on a more reasonably priced SBC.

      • whoami@lemmy.world
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        I’ve also found the Raspberry RP2040 to be a very good option for low-cost micro-controller development (also comes with optional Wi-Fi support, so can be used for ESP32-esque IoT based operations). The datasheet and board development documents are extremely detailed, and it is a first-class target for CircuitPython and Arduino-based development.

        The programmable state machine / PIO functionality is a feature that particularly stands out to me. You get some of the functionality of the FPGA (albeit extremely limited by comparison to actual FPGAs) at a fraction of the cost.

  • Netglitch@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What a spectacularly ironic post OP. You make an incredible claim while providing zero proof. Can you see how that makes you the asshole, talking shit about RPi foundation? On top of that you edited your post to call us all stupid for calling you out. Incredible.

  • Lily@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    I recently moved off a combination of Pi 4 and an old netbook to the ODroid H3+. Orders of magnitude faster while having socketed storage and RAM. The best part is the NVME and SATA ports that let me attach 41TB of raw storage and add a data warehousing nature to my setup. 10/10 would buy again.

  • vsis@feddit.cl
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    and won’t bind you to ARM architecture

    Just wait when people start self-hosting stuff in RISC-V machines lol

    X86_64 being a duopoly is a worse scenario. So, I’m happy to fight in the middle of software poorly tested in different architectures.

  • Rick@thesimplecorner.org
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    1 year ago

    I use mine for my pihole and have been pretty happy. $40 bucks, tiny footprint and power consumption. I have a 3 from 2018. I get where your coming from but gonna need some sauce for your claims.

  • meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe
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    1 year ago

    There are a lot of reasons not to give them your money. They’re assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base.

    Citation needed, Pi’s are just a single member of the broader SBC market. They are great for a lot of projects, especially for beginners who are their primary market, or those unfamiliar with Linux systems.

    It’s just not a spectacular option for hosting. In order to get a Rpi competitive with even the shittiest laptop from 7 years ago, you’re going to end up spending more than you would spend on a decent laptop from 7 years ago.

    Citation needed, currently for what I use my Pi’s for, they are massive overkill. A laptop has WAY more breakable, and less repairable parts. A pi is a SBC, nothing I don’t need. I don’t want a screen, I don’t want a keyboard, I don’t want an ancient battery that is probably bloated from being plugged in all the time, and I absolutely do not want a fan. Honestly the Pi zero is overkill for most of my stuff, I just do actually want a wired network port. Your measure of “competitive” is extremely flawed, because you assume the only thing a Pi is useful for is it’s raw number crunching power when that’s not at all what they are marketed towards. In all honesty, I’d love to see a laptop that was even 50% as good a a Pi, but for that weight and size you’re looking almost entirely at used phones, whose OS is significantly more locked down. Can’t exactly run Docker on Android, let alone dealing with running servers over wifi.

    If it is a computer that turns on, it will likely function orders of magnitude better than an Rpi and won’t bind you to ARM architecture. My entire hosting setup was pulled out of a recycling pile for free. Install ubuntu/ubuntu server and enjoy yourself.

    How could I mount a laptop to my garage door for presence detection of which car is coming and going? Would be kind of an eyesore wouldn’t you think, without even mentioning the weight problems. Laptops are massive compared to a Pi. For your point on ARM specifically, that’s a feature my friend. Alternative cpu architectures are pretty interesting, and I personally have been an avid RISC-V follower for years now, and am absolutely thrilled to bits waiting for a standardized RV solution like the Pi. How lucky of you to just be given everything for free, thanks for taking e-waste out of the landfills for a little while I guess. Most of us have to buy the products we use, maybe getting something from a friend once in a while.

    If you intend on spending any amount of money on this hobby, I cannot express enough how much I recommend against any of that money going toward a Raspberry Pi.

    What do you recommend instead?

    • Brad Ganley@toad.workOP
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      1 year ago

      Sounds like arduinos and a laptop is what you want

      edit: sorry in advance for how unenthusiastic this response is. I’m real fucking tired of talking about this to a crowd of people who have already decided I could never be correct

      • meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe
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        1 year ago

        Arduinos can’t really handle video encoding and presence detection on board. A laptop is extreme overkill, as I said in my post. Don’t want a battery, screen, keyboard, hinges, and fans are a deal breaker. Old laptops are bulky, heavy, have proprietary power bricks that are never cross compatible with each other. A laptop and a SBC are just totally different markets, and are used for totally different things.

  • generalEdo@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I will argue from experience that Homeassistant runs pretty damn good on a pi using an SSD. They have an image specifically for HA as well.

  • spez_@lemmy.world
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    They’re assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base.

    No, they’re restrained by the computer chip shortage, as was every other company. Of course in these times, they’ll support customers who can keep their business afloat.

    My entire hosting setup was pulled out of a recycling pile for free.

    Sure, I bet your electricity prices are through the roof though.

    My Raspberry Pi 4 has been running my NAS perfectly - I’ve got quite a few services running: Restic and Rclone, OpenMediaVault, Portainer, Jellyfin, Transmission, Immich, Gitea, Vaultwarden, Syncthing and Joplin Server

    • Brad Ganley@toad.workOP
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      1 year ago

      I went from 1 to 11 computers running 24/7 and haven’t seen a notable increase in power costs in the last year

      • citron@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        That’s not very telling without more data. Most x86 laptops consume 10W idle, x86 desktop PCs 50W idle. Double or triple that for moderate usage.

        RPis? 5W max.

        It’s not only about electricity costs, it’s also about heat dissipated in your room, fan noise and more generally waste.

        • Brad Ganley@toad.workOP
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          1 year ago

          Two of them are thinkservers, three of them are thinkcentres, and the rest are optiplex workstations.

          • Bitswap@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I’m mildly aligned with your main point OP. Rpi’s have a place and are amazing at many things, but over sold on lots of ‘server’ usages. For the typical homelabber, it’s a hobby so not a big deal that this hardware they likely already have (Rpi) isn’t the best.

            However, this point about energy usage means you have either a large energy bill and can’t see the margin increase OR those 11 systems are mostly idle and you simply don’t need all of them running.

  • klarker@lemmy.one
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    There’s plenty of stuff that maybe I don’t want to self host on the same device and that I would rather host on RPI due to power consumption for example. Not all about money and recycling old computers, but regarding ecology also spending less energy it’s extremely important. Imagine a full desktop computer just to host pihole + pivpn, consuming 30w or more. Sorry but your statement is pretty bias.

          • klarker@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            Actually I run both rpi4, zeros, optiplex and home made servers. But do your own tests. Make sure you document them and send them to me to prove that your correct, because by your logic, with no proof, you look like the bias one having a rant on a dam hobby ;)

  • OldWorldOrder@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If I need something more powerful for stuff like my Minecraft server I use an old laptop running Fedora, but my pi 4 works great as a super low profile, low power, stable http and ssh server.

    What’s this stuff about the pi foundation being assholes though, can someone fill me in?

    • axby@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      My raspberrypi works great as a backup git server, as long as it doesn’t fall off my table and get stepped on or rolled over by my chair. I also host a few static webpages on it for cooking recipes.

      It actually has better uptime than my desktop, which I occasionally boot into windows when I (rarely!) encounter a steam game that doesn’t work well on Linux.

      It does not work well as a DLNA server though, though it seems to manage lower resolution videos okay. I think I tried both tried reading videos from the SD card, and a USB external hard drive.