this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
33 points (53.8% liked)

Selfhosted

40296 readers
559 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I’d still consider them an overall force of good

Maybe rpi, but broadcom absolutely isn't. They are one of the worst companies to work with in embedded.