6 ms·

Not sure if rpis are that relevant as of now when there are so many other, usually more performant and overall compelling offers in the same form factor and ups

by kytazo 3y ago

Not sure if rpis are that relevant as of now when there are so many other, usually more performant and overall compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree.

kkielhofner 3y ago
I agree completely. I've ranted on this a bit on HN before but in many ways the Raspberry Pi is a victim of its own success. It more or less became the "jack of all trades master of none" for a staggering variety of projects and applications - even when it is far from the best approach. I personally cringe when I see people trying to string together a bunch of drives on a shared USB bus for a NAS application, or trying to hack something around the single lane of PCIe or whatever... When by the time you get to kludging that together you could have bought a small used NAS with drive bays for equivalent or less cost that would be at least an order of magnitude faster and significantly more reliable. That said "you do you" and if you want to (poorly) run a bunch of stuff on a half-dozen Rasperry Pis (or whatever) then more power to you. On the flipside of this, the wide ranging and very robust Raspberry Pi ecosystem kicked off a surge of people self hosting all kinds of applications and getting people to leave cloud services. For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that. I'm glad that with the shortage people were forced to re-evaluate some of these approaches and projects to realize things like "Oh, this $100 used Intel XYZ is 20x faster and still low power enough to not mean anything". With the launch of Willow and the Willow Inference Server I'm learning a lot about how people self-host and the variety is staggering. We see everything from "Well I run ABC on Pi 1, DEF on Pi 2, GHI on an old mac mini, and XYZ on an Intel NUC" to single Raspberry Pis to extremely complex Proxmox configurations. I understand a lot of this self-hosting infra grew gradually over the years but needless to say a single, cheap, reasonably powered machine can do all of that and more.
- mmastrac 3y ago
  The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. The original home computing explosion didn't come about because of the power of those early platforms -- it was because the thrill of accomplishing something under the limitations of a popular platform is the reward early pioneers needed to keep going. So yeah, the Pi is not ideal for so many use cases, but successfully arm-wrestling this well-known-but-limited platform into serving web traffic or doing something equally useful is why people keep using it.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    > The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. How is this any different from self-hosting on any other hardware? Other than the admittedly fun and engaging aspect of putting the work in to string together a bunch of USB hubs, cabling, and SATA bridges, etc. I think a lot of that thrill comes from the challenges of pounding a square peg into a round hole along the journey. Again, whatever works for you but it's been curious to watch it progress over the years.
    - mmastrac 3y ago
      You're right about the square peg, but the big difference is the size of the community. I could do this work on any platform but if there's only a handful of people that know what a MangoPi or KiwiPi (names invented) can do, there's a whole lot of context to understand how cool a hack is. Ditto for reading about projects -- it's great that Alice's Intel nuc can serve X pages per second, but it's easier to read and understand the technical feats of someone hacking off traces on a Pi 4 to expose PCIe because we all know the limits of the platform.
      - 3y ago
- leidenfrost 3y ago
  I'm looking for a noiseless low power NAS solution. Any recommendations? After my transtition to an M1, now I can't stand any fan noise running on the background.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    Get a NUC or mini-ITX system and a fanless case[1][2]? [1]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.tpl&type=FANLESS+CASES&type_sub=Intel+NUC&nuc=all&generation=all https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.... [2]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail.tpl&type=FANLESS%20CASES&type_sub=Mini-ITX&model=A-ITX48-M1B https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detai...
    - derefr 3y ago
      Where do the drives live? Drives, as in at least two, but more likely 5, if you're taking fault-tolerance seriously.
      - magicalhippo 3y ago
        Since you want silent it'll be SSD's. One internally, you can get external USB housings for the others. Shouldn't be too shabby if using USB 3.1 or better. If you want HDDs then a fan is a non-issue, the HDDs will drown out the fans.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    An Odroid HC4 https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
- Majromax 3y ago
  > I personally cringe when I see people trying to string together a bunch of drives on a shared USB bus for a NAS application, or trying to hack something around the single lane of PCIe or whatever... When by the time you get to kludging that together you could have bought a small used NAS with drive bays for equivalent or less cost that would be at least an order of magnitude faster and significantly more reliable. I don't think this is a fair comparison. In principle, anyone could follow the hacky instructions for the Pi and complete the same project. In some cases (such as the PiHole), it might even be worthwhile. If your instructions begin with "find a used thin client on eBay," however, then there's no guarantee that the subsequent instructions are useful. My thin terminal might not be the same as the author's, and the author certainly can't specify a single particular brand/model because the eBay stock is limited and changeable. "Mainstreaming" a hobby project needs the standardization at least as much as it needs the performance, and the Raspberry Pi's ecosystem remains an advantage. Ironically, this advantage is the same reason that the company prioritized business deliveries during the shortage, since business use depends even more critically on the stable, supported platform.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    We're in agreement. From my original post, one sentence after your quote: > For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that.
orra 3y ago
> usually more performant and overall compelling offers True. > compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree. But that degree matters. What SBC has the best upstream support these days? Orange? Banana? Pine? I honestly don't know, despite taking a casual interest. Also, upstream and driver support gets worse if you need a newer chipset, to support features like 4k or H.265 or USB PD or 2.5GbE. To be fair, Raspberry Pi doesn't offer the latter.
cramjabsyn 3y ago
What are you using these days? Personally I switched pihole and a few other servixes to a docker container on a USFF pc. Still using a pi4 for retro games
- paulgb 3y ago
  I'd like to know also. I've been looking to upgrade a Raspberry Pi 3 that runs a dashboard display and have been checking Raspberry Pi 4 stock, but if there's another device I should be using in the same MSRP range I'd like to have a look.
regularfry 3y ago
Quantity has a quality all of its own. Nothing else has quite the same scale. It doesn't hurt that the OS is a very well-supported Debian derivative, but the uniformity of the ecosystem is a massive benefit you don't really get anywhere else.
- tssva 3y ago
  Raspberry Pi OS is a well-supported Debian derivative but there are a wide variety of operating systems available for the Pi. I don't run Raspberry Pi OS on any of my Pi's. That being said, I do run a Debian derivative on a few of my Pi's, Ubuntu server. I run OpenWRT on 2 Pi's and Fedora Desktop on another.
IshKebab 3y ago
Software support.
tjoff 3y ago
On the contrary, the Pi has gone from a small computer to the base of many projects. Where for many self-hosting is synonymous with the raspberry pi. I don't necessarily agree with that, but it is a pretty great starting point. The competition has a very long way to go to be comparable. Performance is also seldom the limiting factor.
washadjeffmad 3y ago
Chromeboxes, ThinkCentre M-series, OptiPlex Micros and 7070 Ultras, Intel J-series boards, etc have been around since before the supply chain disruptions, but I have so many projects built around and parts for rpi that I can't as easily scale or retool. I think their scarcity has made us all appreciate what having consistent low-power SBC platforms with convenient programmable interfaces is. I found uses for every Pi 0/2/3/4 I had that had been sitting disused because I was too excited to move to 4s when I really didn't need more power.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
LeafItAlone 3y ago
To me, the frequent posts about RPi projects, sourcing, and the like that reach the front page of HN suggests otherwise. What is your suggested favorite replacement? All the less that I’ve looked into are either just as hard to get and expensive or are discontinued before they gain ground. Happy to consider other options.
ThatPlayer 3y ago
Which compelling offers did you have in mind? The similar boards I can get at 35$ are Orange Pi 3, Orange Pi Zero 2, MangoPi MQ-Pro, Le Potato. None of which are better than a Pi 4 (at least in my use cases). Could I spend more for a better board like the RK3588 boards? Sure, I have a Rock5B and Orange Pi 5. But I don't want to spend more for performance I don't need.
ReptileMan 3y ago
List 3 please. That is without a snark. I needed couple of pi-s for some personal project and it was EUR 100 or more per piece. Up to the point where cheap android rooted phone looked like a better option.
sys_64738 3y ago
The RPis is ubiquitous for cheap and plentiful supply while not being the most performant. Their widespread availability and support makes them the de facto base model for almost all cheap electronics projects nowadays.

by kytazo 3y ago

Not sure if rpis are that relevant as of now when there are so many other, usually more performant and overall compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree.

kkielhofner 3y ago

I agree completely. I've ranted on this a bit on HN before but in many ways the Raspberry Pi is a victim of its own success. It more or less became the "jack of all trades master of none" for a staggering variety of projects and applications - even when it is far from the best approach. I personally cringe when I see people trying to string together a bunch of drives on a shared USB bus for a NAS application, or trying to hack something around the single lane of PCIe or whatever... When by the time you get to kludging that together you could have bought a small used NAS with drive bays for equivalent or less cost that would be at least an order of magnitude faster and significantly more reliable. That said "you do you" and if you want to (poorly) run a bunch of stuff on a half-dozen Rasperry Pis (or whatever) then more power to you. On the flipside of this, the wide ranging and very robust Raspberry Pi ecosystem kicked off a surge of people self hosting all kinds of applications and getting people to leave cloud services. For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that. I'm glad that with the shortage people were forced to re-evaluate some of these approaches and projects to realize things like "Oh, this $100 used Intel XYZ is 20x faster and still low power enough to not mean anything". With the launch of Willow and the Willow Inference Server I'm learning a lot about how people self-host and the variety is staggering. We see everything from "Well I run ABC on Pi 1, DEF on Pi 2, GHI on an old mac mini, and XYZ on an Intel NUC" to single Raspberry Pis to extremely complex Proxmox configurations. I understand a lot of this self-hosting infra grew gradually over the years but needless to say a single, cheap, reasonably powered machine can do all of that and more.

mmastrac 3y ago
The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. The original home computing explosion didn't come about because of the power of those early platforms -- it was because the thrill of accomplishing something under the limitations of a popular platform is the reward early pioneers needed to keep going. So yeah, the Pi is not ideal for so many use cases, but successfully arm-wrestling this well-known-but-limited platform into serving web traffic or doing something equally useful is why people keep using it.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  > The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. How is this any different from self-hosting on any other hardware? Other than the admittedly fun and engaging aspect of putting the work in to string together a bunch of USB hubs, cabling, and SATA bridges, etc. I think a lot of that thrill comes from the challenges of pounding a square peg into a round hole along the journey. Again, whatever works for you but it's been curious to watch it progress over the years.
  - mmastrac 3y ago
    You're right about the square peg, but the big difference is the size of the community. I could do this work on any platform but if there's only a handful of people that know what a MangoPi or KiwiPi (names invented) can do, there's a whole lot of context to understand how cool a hack is. Ditto for reading about projects -- it's great that Alice's Intel nuc can serve X pages per second, but it's easier to read and understand the technical feats of someone hacking off traces on a Pi 4 to expose PCIe because we all know the limits of the platform.
    - 3y ago
leidenfrost 3y ago
I'm looking for a noiseless low power NAS solution. Any recommendations? After my transtition to an M1, now I can't stand any fan noise running on the background.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  Get a NUC or mini-ITX system and a fanless case[1][2]? [1]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.tpl&type=FANLESS+CASES&type_sub=Intel+NUC&nuc=all&generation=all https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.... [2]: https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail.tpl&type=FANLESS%20CASES&type_sub=Mini-ITX&model=A-ITX48-M1B https://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detai...
  - derefr 3y ago
    Where do the drives live? Drives, as in at least two, but more likely 5, if you're taking fault-tolerance seriously.
    - magicalhippo 3y ago
      Since you want silent it'll be SSD's. One internally, you can get external USB housings for the others. Shouldn't be too shabby if using USB 3.1 or better. If you want HDDs then a fan is a non-issue, the HDDs will drown out the fans.
- pmontra 3y ago
  An Odroid HC4 https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
Majromax 3y ago
> I personally cringe when I see people trying to string together a bunch of drives on a shared USB bus for a NAS application, or trying to hack something around the single lane of PCIe or whatever... When by the time you get to kludging that together you could have bought a small used NAS with drive bays for equivalent or less cost that would be at least an order of magnitude faster and significantly more reliable. I don't think this is a fair comparison. In principle, anyone could follow the hacky instructions for the Pi and complete the same project. In some cases (such as the PiHole), it might even be worthwhile. If your instructions begin with "find a used thin client on eBay," however, then there's no guarantee that the subsequent instructions are useful. My thin terminal might not be the same as the author's, and the author certainly can't specify a single particular brand/model because the eBay stock is limited and changeable. "Mainstreaming" a hobby project needs the standardization at least as much as it needs the performance, and the Raspberry Pi's ecosystem remains an advantage. Ironically, this advantage is the same reason that the company prioritized business deliveries during the shortage, since business use depends even more critically on the stable, supported platform.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  We're in agreement. From my original post, one sentence after your quote: > For whatever reasons the "look for a thin client on eBay" approach was never going to kick off the explosion of these self-hosting options and projects. So we should all be very thankful of the Raspberry Pi for that.

orra 3y ago

> usually more performant and overall compelling offers True. > compelling offers in the same form factor and upstream support to a certain degree. But that degree matters. What SBC has the best upstream support these days? Orange? Banana? Pine? I honestly don't know, despite taking a casual interest. Also, upstream and driver support gets worse if you need a newer chipset, to support features like 4k or H.265 or USB PD or 2.5GbE. To be fair, Raspberry Pi doesn't offer the latter.

cramjabsyn 3y ago

What are you using these days? Personally I switched pihole and a few other servixes to a docker container on a USFF pc. Still using a pi4 for retro games

paulgb 3y ago
I'd like to know also. I've been looking to upgrade a Raspberry Pi 3 that runs a dashboard display and have been checking Raspberry Pi 4 stock, but if there's another device I should be using in the same MSRP range I'd like to have a look.

regularfry 3y ago

Quantity has a quality all of its own. Nothing else has quite the same scale. It doesn't hurt that the OS is a very well-supported Debian derivative, but the uniformity of the ecosystem is a massive benefit you don't really get anywhere else.

tssva 3y ago
Raspberry Pi OS is a well-supported Debian derivative but there are a wide variety of operating systems available for the Pi. I don't run Raspberry Pi OS on any of my Pi's. That being said, I do run a Debian derivative on a few of my Pi's, Ubuntu server. I run OpenWRT on 2 Pi's and Fedora Desktop on another.

IshKebab 3y ago

Software support.

tjoff 3y ago

On the contrary, the Pi has gone from a small computer to the base of many projects. Where for many self-hosting is synonymous with the raspberry pi. I don't necessarily agree with that, but it is a pretty great starting point. The competition has a very long way to go to be comparable. Performance is also seldom the limiting factor.

washadjeffmad 3y ago

Chromeboxes, ThinkCentre M-series, OptiPlex Micros and 7070 Ultras, Intel J-series boards, etc have been around since before the supply chain disruptions, but I have so many projects built around and parts for rpi that I can't as easily scale or retool. I think their scarcity has made us all appreciate what having consistent low-power SBC platforms with convenient programmable interfaces is. I found uses for every Pi 0/2/3/4 I had that had been sitting disused because I was too excited to move to 4s when I really didn't need more power.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

LeafItAlone 3y ago

To me, the frequent posts about RPi projects, sourcing, and the like that reach the front page of HN suggests otherwise. What is your suggested favorite replacement? All the less that I’ve looked into are either just as hard to get and expensive or are discontinued before they gain ground. Happy to consider other options.

ThatPlayer 3y ago

Which compelling offers did you have in mind? The similar boards I can get at 35$ are Orange Pi 3, Orange Pi Zero 2, MangoPi MQ-Pro, Le Potato. None of which are better than a Pi 4 (at least in my use cases). Could I spend more for a better board like the RK3588 boards? Sure, I have a Rock5B and Orange Pi 5. But I don't want to spend more for performance I don't need.

ReptileMan 3y ago

List 3 please. That is without a snark. I needed couple of pi-s for some personal project and it was EUR 100 or more per piece. Up to the point where cheap android rooted phone looked like a better option.

sys_64738 3y ago

The RPis is ubiquitous for cheap and plentiful supply while not being the most performant. Their widespread availability and support makes them the de facto base model for almost all cheap electronics projects nowadays.