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So SBCs are shit now?
Nothing changed, the hardware is the same as before. Your little pi servers are still doing the exact same work they did before. The only variables are prices on SBCs vs used small factor x86s, and the short, short attention span of terminally online hobbyists.
Use whatever you like, no need to race after others' subjective (and often hyperbolic) judgment.
Very much this. The allure of raspberry pis was that they were $30 toys that could actually be used to do things that were equivalent to much more expensive computers and computer control systems.
Somewhere along the way they lost the plot, probably when supply chain issues drove their prices sky high along with the compute modules being used for home lab servers, and now cheap knockoffs based off of Rockville chips or ESP32 are just as capable as raspberry pis for a fraction of the cost, and at the same time actual desktop computers in miniature form factor have become so cheap on the second hand market that they are incredibly competitive with the raspberry pi.
Don't get me wrong, pi is a great platform. But the use cases in which it leads the pack have become incredibly narrow.
Actually I can't think of anything that raspberry pi does that can't be done better by a less expensive alternative.
Even the pi5 with the nvme hat is not currently price competitive with a 4-year-old HP ultra small form factor as far as I know.
Yeah, make a Pi with 1GB RAM, video & ethernet for like 20-30€ and you'd ruin me.
I know about the banana, orange, whetever-pis but in my experience they always needed lots of extra stuff to work (like fucing and recompiling libraries). The Pi "just worked" IMO.
Actually I can’t think of anything that raspberry pi does that can’t be done better by a less expensive alternative.
That has been true even before the price increase - what still makes me use pis now and then is that just so many people are familiar with them, the standardized form factor with lots of extension modules, and the software support - pretty much any software targeting that kind of use has been tested on pi variants.
I'd nowadays go for using compute modules, though - they're smaller, and you can get them with flash, eliminating the SD card problem many pis had. You can get carrier boards for the compute modules in the classic pi form factor, so you can have the best of both worlds.
People are shitting on them because the price point for arm sbcs has risen, while the price point for small x86 computers has come down. Also, x86 availability is high and arm sbc availability has become unreliable. They also aren't generally supported nearly as well. If you don't need more power and you already have them on hand there's no reason not to use them.
The price is what happened. A pi 5 costs almost as much as an old used computer.
This exactly. If you already have Pis they are still great. Back when they were $35 it was a pretty good value proposition with none of the power or space requirements of a full size x86 PC. But for $80-$100 it's really only worth it if you actually need something small, or if you plan to actually use the gpio pins for a project.
If you're just hosting software a several year old used desktop will outperform it significantly and cost about the same.
The only reason SBCs were ever relevant is because of the excellent pricing, which has now been matched by used x86 computers. That and if the SBC had an open-source design/implementation (open schematics on RISC-V)
Not just the pricing, but also the low footprint, tiny size and fanlessness.
I have an x86 proxmox setup. I stuck a kill-o-watt on it. Keep your pi setup if it does what you want, and realize that there's someone out there who is jealous of your power bill.
How bad is it?
My current file server, an old gaming rig, consumes 100w at idle.
I'm considering a TrueNAS box running either 2.5" ssd's or NVME sticks (My storage target is under 8TB, and that's including 3 years projected growth).
Go tweak your power and fan settings. 100w at idle is way too much unless it’s 15 years old.
Fans, especially small ones are very sneaky energy hogs. Turn them waaay down.
Depends on what your server is running. Multiple GPUs, HDDs, and other fun items start to add up to well over 100W. I justify it by using it to keep my 3d printer filament dry.
What happened is that people realized what I've been saying since ever - that the RPi and others are a money grab because of all the required accessories while a MiniPC will get you way more power, stable hardware , case, power supply and everything in between for the same price (if you go for second hand). Here is are examples of such posts: https://lemmy.world/comment/5357961 , https://lemmy.world/comment/4696545
For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.
Either way, Pis have their use cases however in my opinion it was an overhyped product that sits on the middle of a market:
Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox
Proxmox isn't a new thing, in fact it is a pile of crap and questionable open-source that people still run because they haven't discovered LXC/LXD yet. Read more here: https://lemmy.world/comment/6507871. FYI you can run LXD on your Pis and get both containers and virtual machines with it in the same way Proxmox people do with x86.
The irony of this comment is that people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD in the same way they used to when I said that Pis were a money grab and x86 MiniPCs were way better.
Quite the teardown fair play
I don't understand this post. Whatever you bought then for they're still good for. People's opinions don't make them less useful.
Sir, this is Lemmy. People treat the applications and hardware you use with ethical alignment and switching to FOSS literally has approval on the level of religious conversion.
It's no wonder people around here care so much about random people's opinions, the place practically filters for it.
Pi 4's were hard to get there for a while. Pi 5's are expensive. Lot of other SBCs are also expensive, as in not all that much cheaper than a 2-3 generations old low-end x86. That makes them less attractive for special purpose computing, especially among people who have a lot of old hardware lying around.
Any desktop from the last decade can easily host multiple single-household computer services, and it's easier to maintain just one box than a half dozen SBCs, with a half dozen power supplies, a half dozen network connections, etc. Selfhosters often have a 'real' computer running 24/7 for video transcoding or something, so hosting a bunch of minimal-use services on it doesn't even increase the electric bill.
For me, the most interesting aspect of those SBCs was GPIO and access to raw sensor data. In the last few years, 'smart home' technology seems to have really exploded, to where many of the sensors I was interested in 10 years ago are now available with zigbee, bluetooth or even wifi connectivity, so you don't need that GPIO anymore. There are still some specific control applications where, for me, Pi's make sense, but I'm more likely to migrate towards Pi-0 than Pi-5.
SBCs were also an attractive solution for media/home theater displays, as clients for plex/jellyfin/mythtv servers, but modern smart-TVs seem mostly to have built-in clients for most of those. Personally, I'm still happy with kodi running on a pi-4 and a 15 year old dumb TV.
huh? What happened? Who's shitting on ARM?
Man who sits upside on toilet.
I'm just going to say, I shit on them all along. ARM is relatively expensive, bespoke and difficult to compile for because of that. Anyone can puke out a binary for amd64 that works everywhere. And way, way faster than some sad little SOC. Especially weird is spending $1000 on a clusterboard with CMs that had half of the power of a 5 year old X86 SFF desktop you could pick up for $75 and attach some actual storage to.
Maybe RISC-V will change all that, but I doubt it. Sure hope so though. The price factor has already leaned the right way to make it worthwhile.
2 - 8 watts of power for a Pi vs 9-150watts for an x86 system. There are definitely use-cases.
I use a Pi for DHCP, DNS with PiHole, Tailscale Subnet Router, Rustdesk server, Vaultwarden, Syncthing (connects to local device shares, rather than run ST on each device), ArchiveBox, and working on instant messaging (maybe SimpleX, not sure yet). It's kind of maxed out.
But all this runs under 8watts (actually it's so low my smart switch doesn't even register the consumption).
Uh, my server is an x86, is fanless and the cpu idles at 9 and maxes at 12. Is much faster then my pi and has quicksync.
I run plex, jellyfin, smb shares, mealie, tailscale and rerouting, notes, and books.
I like my pi but performance per watt isn't as drastic with x86 if you build for it. Did I mention it's also fanless? Passive heating that just works on the cpu.
A lot of stuff runs great on SBCs, it's just that they're not as smooth to manage as a Proxmox server running containers or VMs. You also need several SBCs to reach the scale of what many do here on selfhosted and once you reach 4+ SBCs the old x86 server starts looking cost effective all of a sudden. The biggest benefit though is the no noise and very low power consumption, which is great for stuff that will be powered on 24/7/365.
Really a mix is ideal, so you can get the benefits of cheap running costs of SBCs and the power and versatility of x86 for the tasks that require it.
It's about fitness for purpose, IMO.
I recently migrated most of my homelab to Proxmox running on a pair of x86 boxes. I did it because I was cutting the streaming cord, and wanted to build a beefy Plex capability for myself. I also wanted to virtualise my router/firewall with OPNsense.
Once I mastered Proxmox, and truly came to appreciate both the clean separation of services and the rapid prototyping capability it gave me, I migrated a lot of my homelab over.
But, I still use RasPis for a few purposes: Frigate server, second Pi-hole instance, backup Wireguard server. I even have one dedicated to hosting temperature sensors, reed switches, and webcams for our pet lizard's enclosure.
Each has their place for me.
I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?
Fuck, if you can't figure out what to do with them, give them to me and I will! There's so many fun art projects you can get up to with Pis.
If you're not into the whole Google Home/Alexa/Apple Home echo system, and have Home Assistant already running, you could use them to build a bunch of smart assistants with Open Thread Border Routers.
I was just looking at doing this in my house but the cost of Pis vs used Google Gen2s with Thread Border Routers built in was cost prohibitive for me.
I have a microserver and various pis ( zero w, 2x 3b+ and a pi b)
With the exception of the zero w they are all still in action.
The pi b connects to the pi touchscreen and displays photos from a directory every 5 minutes.
The 2x3bs are running kodi to stream from my server.
The zero w was a camera recording and streaming 24/7 but I stopped it as I wanted to do other stuff with it.
Don't bin them, sell them
Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?
It's because the price point is really high now. There's nothing wrong with the hardware you have.
They are still good, arm is awesome. i have Pi4 as OpenMediaVault and docker/homeassistant, etc. Friend gave me a Pi2 surprisingly OMV6 installs on it (even though it ia technically not supported), that one became a PiHole. My 13 year old iomega arm NAS just got converted to a debian minidlna server. Uses 20% of the 256MB RAM.
If I had all the time I wanted to homelab, I would get me a Nas box and run like 10 pis of different vintages as purpose built servers.
A pi to run PHP, a pi to run mysql, a fleet of pis as docker nodes.
The problems I've had with my RPis have all revolved around the fragility of their SD storage. I got burned one too many times trying to host something important in my house with these things, just for them to get corrupted and lose everything. Backing up these systems was its own nightmare, which failed as much as it succeeded.
Pine64 makes some cool devices that run on 100% free software.
Man my home server IDLES at 76 watts per hour running x86. Now mind you I need the x86 to perform some of the functions I want. This thing works as an NAS, nextcloud, media server, kiwix, security camera (zoneminder), remote desktop (xrdp), runs home assistant, gpu AI upscaling for photos, and finally screeches along running a virtual pipe organ I built that takes 69 GB of RAM to run.
If I could do that with raspberry pi's I would in a heartbeat! the power savings alone would eventually pay for them. If it's doing what you want then don't worry about them. My pi400 works as a remote desktop client and one day I hope more of this stuff will work well on it/a future generation so I can ditch the tower, energy usage, and noise.
What is that virtual pipe organ and why is it using 69 GB RAM when running?
A lot of people, myself included, got pissed off at the Pi Foundation during the chip shortage for exclusively shipping boards to business customers who vacuumed up every single one of them faster than any consumer could. You couldn't shake a stick at any Pi for less than 3x MSRP from scalpers, which at that point, you're literally better off grabbing a NUC. They showed their true colors and it left a bad taste in all our mouths, and I will never be buying another Pi.
Really the ARM hate just comes down to ecosystem support. A lot of the SBC's from other Chinese suppliers have mid kernel/OS level support at best, and a limited range of compiled software. For a lot of purposes, going x86 simplifies setup and opens up the software realm so, so much.