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
I’ve been testing some alternative SBCs like the OrangePi 5.
Currently mine is a fallback DNS server and reverse proxy for my network, trying to come up with some other uses for it.
They’re still low power ARM boxes, but they’re much cheaper than the RPi is at the moment.
They also have really bad support. And i’m not talking about holding your hand. I’m talking about hardware support.
I almost ordered an Orange Pi5 yesterday. I realized I still have a couple RPi4s around, and I’d just be spending money on something I really don’t need. I’m waiting for a good excuse though, the reviews looked pretty solid. What are your impressions?
Doesn’t come with a power adapter and has weird power requirements. Wouldn’t power up at all with a standard 5V 1A wall plug, needed 5V 4A.
Apart from that it’s been perfectly fine. I wish other OS than the armbian they provide supported this CPU.
Nice.
I’ve had acceptable outcomes on LibreComputer boxes running Armbian. I’ve had terrible luck with anything except the core Armbian image, but for a lot of stuff, Armbian on Libre gets the job done during the chip shortage.