I installed ubuntu for my mother, she just needs to download pdfs and read pdfs, look at images, use gmail. Sometimes she opens a document with LibreOffice, but no power usage.
Seems to work, the maintenance is also now super easy, ssh, update. Something wrong and she needs support? I ssh, open up a tunnel and connect via remina to her desktop to explain.
I had a situation once when Ubuntu did literally not go into the Desktop Environment anymore, but all I did was update and upgrade packages and it started working again.
This is normal in business. Now that tech dominates they use that market position to setup monopolies. If we had functional anti-trust laws then it wouldn't feel so dire. Allowing monopolies in a capitalist system is the worst economic policy since socialism.
I remember being grilled for not creating "jsony" interfaces:
message Response {
string id = 1;
oneof sub {
SubTypeOne sub_type_one = 2;
SubTypeTwo sub_type_two = 3;
}
}
message SubTypeOne {
string field = 1;
}
message SubTypeTwo {
}
In your current model you just don't have any fields in this subtype, but the response looked like this with our auto translator:
{ "id": "id", "sub_type_two": { } }
Functionally, it works, and code written for this will work if new fields appear. However, returning empty objects to signify the type of response is strange in the web world. But when you write the protobuf you might not notice
Bought a mini pc with N100 and 16GB of ram, SSD included, no need to buy an enclosure, everything setup and ready, just needed to install Linux from a USB stick with the normal procedure.
I might have chosen RPI5 if it had 16GB ram, but I went with x86 and I like it because there are no software issues anymore (redpanda was not working on rpi)
I run a couple of N100s with 32GBs of RAM. They're great machines, but they are actively cooled, so they have dust (and noise) issues, and they're bigger than a RPi 5.
On the other hand, I have an "armor case" for my RPi5 which has contacts for every major IC on the board, and it runs at most at 50 degrees C (if I saturate it to the point of choking).
Plus it's way smaller, and there's no performance or software problems. One of the hidden tricks is to get an A2 card like Kingston Canvas Go+, which completely removes SD card related lag from the system.
A Mac mini is still significantly bigger than a Raspberry Pi 5. On the other hand, there are N97/N100 machines with 12GB of soldered DDR5 RAM, but they are also actively cooled and their smaller blowers are whinier than their bigger cousins.
A passive RPi5 connected to a small 4TB external SSD is an almost industrial device which you remember you have one because it becomes unresponsive to a power cut or something. They're that reliable from my experience.
I have a newly acquired habit of getting the thing which requires the least amount of maintenance for my needs. I can replace it with a more powerful, power hungry and noisier device if I really need that, however this is rarely the case for me, and I can use my laptop for that oddjob.
> On the other hand, there are N97/N100 machines with 12GB of soldered DDR5 RAM, but they are also actively cooled and their smaller blowers are whinier than their bigger cousins.
Yes, but like I said there are also mini pcs that meet or exceed those specs that don't have any fans nor any coil whine. Of course you need bigger heat sinks when you draw more wattage (or maybe you're fine with some thermal throttling), but even this is quite manageable. I have multiple machines like this that are 100% reliable with zero maintenance.
As I said earlier, these machines doesn’t fit my space requirements, and I don’t need more powerful machines due to my processing needs and unwillingness to have space heaters. So, ARM based single board computers fit the bill perfectly for me.
I’m not ignoring or denying these systems’ existence. I just note that they don’t fit into my constraints and requirements for my home server needs.
"A passive RPi5 connected to a small 4TB external SSD is an almost industrial device you remember you have one because it becomes unresponsive to a power cut or something."
An official RaspberryPi 5 PSU is akin to a 27W mini brick which doesn't block any adjacent sockets on a power strip. However, the power bricks came with my N100 systems are similar size to 60-80W MacBook power bricks, they're way bigger, even if they're not significantly more powerful.
No, N100 systems do not contain their power supplies in the box. They're external.
If you were to build it yourself, you can find passively cooled N100 Mini ITX motherboards (I own an Asus N100 Prime) which you can fit with a pico ATX PSU or HDPlex PSU. Pair with a SFF case, you could get it around the size of a mac mini without the brick. Maybe something like a skyreach case.
Again, too big for my requirements. What I want is a box I can forget until it breaks or I need something directly from it. RPi5 allows me to do that while handling a ton of workload for me.
Maybe the tasks it does are light from CPU/IO perspective, but the burden I offload to it is tremendous.
The N100 systems I have are desktop systems which spend most of their life powered off or at standby.
Yep its a better deal. Counterintuitively, the N97 is newer and has higher performance than the N100, especially its built-in graphics. It does consume more power though (12W vs 6W).
Ah the ol' obligatory "a mini pc is much better" reply we see on every. single. Raspberry Pi post. I kid but seriously do we need to do this every time we discuss the RPi?
The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi is the most sustained example of tech industry gift-horse-examination I can think of.
Here they are with a wide range of SBCs and microcontrollers at a wide range of price points, with a level of industrial support, OS support, community support and documentation that none of their competitors match, committing to (and displaying the fruits of that commitment to) support each piece of hardware for over a decade, and HN is like:
"Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"
Dudes. It's not the same picture.
And sure, secondhand PCs. Good. But that is a completely different, entirely subjective comparison.
> Like clockwork. [...] The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi [...]
Dudes. It's not the same picture.
In sum, there are two groups of users who have purchased/considered the R.Pi products: (a) people who have homelab infrastructure, (b-c) people who enjoy a learning platform and may also like the Pi 400 and Pi 500.
The R.Pi's support and community are worth the increased cost.
> "Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"
I feel like it kind of needs to be said, ever since RaspberryPis stopped being price-competitive. Most of the original sales pitch for why you should adopt an extremely weird proprietary ARM-variant was centred on price.
I think the problem with your bullet points is that something like an ESP32 beats a Pi at all of these criteria (as well as on cost), and can be wired/wirelessly tethered to whatever PC you have handy if you actually need a bunch of compute.
With the exception of the Zero, Pi has always been playing in the realm of "this is a real computer, except cheaper". And that's a pretty crowded space these days.
Incidentally that slide deck mentions the pi zero - which is still very cheap (the 2w is about $20 where I live), so I guess they're still honouring that even if their fancy one is pricy-ish.
The comments in that thread are very focused on the price point (many doubting it could hit $25, which it actually did reach) so I stand corrected; it was clearly part of both the marketing and the attraction.
I think most people buying RPis for the GPIO would be better served by a small microcontroller devboard like the Arduino Uno acting as the intermediary between the computer and the wires. This way if anything goes wrong (overvoltage, short) then the Arduino takes the impact and is much cheaper to replace.
It needs to be said as long as RPI's are this expensive they were supposed to be VERY cheap SBC's and instead they're approaching and in some cases exceeding full commercial boxed products
Because there are a shocking number of folks that don’t realize just how cheap you can get a used mini-pc off eBay. And if the only thing you’re missing is gpio that can easily be added.
And frankly our planet needs to do a lot more reusing in that “reduce, reuse, recycle” system if we plan on leaving anything to our great grandchildren.
The reason that safety briefings on every single plane take-off is not because people might be flying for the first time- it's to reiterate important points to bury important information in your mind despite not using it.
Our brains are extremely good at getting rid of data that it thinks is not relevant, if you don't apply knowledge or information your mind will "optimise" it away. Hence, the infinite repetition.
The same is true here. If you're buying a raspberry pi just for hosting: it's foolish not to consider alternatives.
This is important for two reasons, and less important for a third.
1) It free's up supply of rPIs for people who will actually use them for GPIO and education
2) It actually gives people a better, more wholistic experience, at a better price.
3) It forces people to consider the reason for purchase; instead of piling up some e-waste because the RPI was purchased for a yet unknown reason "I can use it for anything*".
Your post just highlights the extreme absurdity of these urgent "my God, don't you know about mini PCs!" and "you could just buy a used computer on eBay!" posts that accompany every Raspberry Pi announcement. You really believe you're offering a safety briefing.
sorry, I didn’t mean to give the impression that I was suggesting that this kind of comment is akin to a “safety briefing” - in so far as it makes you safer.
What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s very easy for mundane information to be lost and so it bears repetition.
I don’t believe I’m offering a safety briefing, I believe the author is making the point that if you’re looking for something to host a service, you will be better served with something more suitable to the task. And not something that is designed for something completely different; constraining the supply and making things more expensive and difficult than they need to be
It is a minisforum UN100L. I disabled WiFi and other devices I don’t use in the bios. And then run Linux with the power saving mode. I also applied all the suggestions from powertop. Some suggest to also disable boost. Although it does save a bit of power by preventing spikes of power, it also makes the whole machine that much slower. So I’m content with the device using 4W idle, 8W-12W for busy, and a max of 24W when maxing out the CPU and GPU.
Not parent, I'm mostly looking at small thinkcentres for that price. The last one I looked at was about $60 for a unit that needs a power supply (about $20) and a couple drives. I haven't figured out a specific model I want yet.
They are excellent. I have a few of these with Intel Core i5-7500t and Core i7-7700t (both 35W TDP), with either 65W or 90W powerbricks, each with 32GB and varying SSDs.
Excellent because of the quality of their BIOS/Firmware. You can throw anything at them, and it just runs without errors.
Even most exotic stuff like https://genode.org , not to speak of any *BSD, Solaris-derivative, or some Linux.
Suspend to RAM, and successfully waking up from that works every single time, without special setup, no matter where and what.
Hibernation/Suspend to disk is up to you and the setup, but no problems there, either.
Rock solid experience even with the 'most riced' kernels and userland by https://cachyos.org running Plasma/KDE on 'oh noez! BTRFS!1!1!!'
If the number of ports and their speed is enough, they are good for homelabbing and even
casual desktop-use. Expansion not so much, except via USB3. (5Gb/s only)
I know nothing about later models, but these are more than enough for my uses.
If you need a PC, as in a desktop or a generic server, by all means buy a PC.
If you need a ton of fast and sophisticated GPIO, small size, light weight. passive cooling, battery-powered operation, a PC starts looking a bit problematic. That's where an RPi fits in.
I don't know, all my use cases where I needed GPIO are better satisfied by an ESP32. If I need more compute, I connect the ESP32 to my server via the internet.
Makes sense for many applications. But what if you are building an autonomous flying drone? That's the kind of application at which RPi shines, to my mind.
(Otherwise, indeed, an ESP32 has rather adequate amounts of compute and RAM for many control applications.)
Unless it processes images on the fly to do some sort of image-based steering or target recognition, an Arduino or comparable microcontroller should be beefy enough [1].
In mobile applications, power consumption of a RPi quickly becomes an issue.
Yes, an autonomous drone would have to process images, height data, map data, etc, so the compute of an RPi would still be relevant. Also, the drone does not have to max out the CPU all the time, it just may need intense compute in some situations, say, depending on the terrain. Larger drones, such as delivery drones, have motors with power consumption that dwarfs that of an RPi. For a a small, palm-sized drone it's of course untenable.
I have an Orange Pi 5 16G, which was a lot more powerful than an RPi4, and more available when I purchased it. I generally like it. It does the headless server things I'm looking for, but it has had a few quirks over time. Distro support isn't great but Armbian runs well.
For the price, and what I use, I would probably buy a mini PC at this point.
In general, with boards that aren't Raspberry Pi, always focus on the now, and not the things it should be able to do later. Often they're stuck on a kernel with whatever patches they run at release. Sometimes the community fixes that, but not always.
The Intel Celeron mini PCs you decided to exclude because they don't fit your narrative, actually use less power at full clock and idle at the same power consumption.
They're slightly slower at peak, but they're also a much fuller package with SSD interface, Intel graphics with multiple monitor support and no need for running custom linux distros due to x86.
I'm not the OP but have a little collection of mini pcs (5 of them) so, if you'll allow me, I'll comment on why I have them...
The form factor is very convenient, two of them are my mother and my wife's "desktop" pcs - they're both attached to their monitors and, with wireless keyboards and mice they stay discreet and don't take up a lot of room but are very good desktops for daily email reading, recipe browsing and facebooking. My mother and wife don't complain about them - they're more interested in the the compact size and staying out of the way than the performance.
Two of them are small servers that I run stuff that my Raspberry Pis can't handle (I still don't have a Pi 5, WAY too expensive around here) - quick, low noise and isn't too power hungry. Runs linux perfectly and I never have a problem with software (the n100 is a great little CPU). I have 2 because of some weird sale on Aliexpress - 2 for the price of 1-and-a-half was something I couldn't pass up on.
The final one is attached to our main TV, it's a converted TV box (running Armbian) that's an amazingly powerful piece of cheap hardware. It's our main movie viewer (off of our DLNA NAS) it can hand 1080p video just fine on a crappy 5V power supply.
I'm interested in your TV box. What OS are you using? I assume it has a remote control of some kind? I'm guessing it doesn't run apps like Netflix? Do you have a browser or something for that instead, or do you just run local media?
I ask all this because I'm sick of my android tv boxes locking up about once a month, and I'd like something a little more powerful.
At my work we use NUCs a lot - we put them into custom enclosure together with touch screen (1920x1080, not something small), then mount that on CNC machines to let users browse work plans, access ERP etc., get measuring data from dislocated unit, etc.
NUCs are underrated IMHO. I picked up a NUC7 mid-2020, mounts on a VESA plate behind my monitor, used for media, fileshare, general Linux tinkering and VMs. Zero problems (except for a secondary disk failure last year, spinning rust type).
Nice to see Asus have finally started doing something with them.
I see there's lots of competition (or at least, lots of options) in that space now.
They are suprisingly reliable - the only problem we repeatedly have is CMOS batteries draining if they are turned off during vacation period (happens for less than 5% of our rigs though).
I just bought one for 120€ (from AliExpress). I will use it to replace my small 2-disk NAS by adding an usb HDD dock and to host some small personal servers (for managing recipes, groceries, tools, downloads, etc, nothing fancy).
I initially considered a rpi5 + SATA HAT because I don't need much power and the N100 is definitely more power hungry than a RPi but the price tag that included 16gb ram and 512gb SSD convinced me to buy the minipc.
I also considered buying a N100 motherboard with 4-6 SATA port to not rely on a single usb port for the NAS port but it was more expensive than the PC and without RAM or hard drive
Note that I was surprised to discover it was not possible to install Linux headless easily like on the SBCs. Also I decided to try out nixos but I don't really have the time and energy to learn a new paradigm and I will probably go back to Debian or similar when I have the time
What models are new enough to consider? Do any of these support ECC ram? And would you say mirrored ZFS is good enough for home use? Most of my storage is media for Plex or edited in Resolve and such. I have a 6x3TB zraid2 setup at the moment with aging disks (2015~), but looking to upgrade that. Not sure if I can go the route of just having 2x10TB or something instead, perhaps with a off-site backup to a identical system for the important stuff. Currently I rely on having the important bits copied several places, and just accepting I'll lose some data if everything catches fire here locally
Depends on really what do you want to do. For just data storage, NAS, pretty much anything goes. If you want to run VMs, Docker etc. you want something newer. Personally I use Optiplex Micro 3080 with i5-10500T. That was 270€ refurbished.
>Do any of these support ECC ram
No, as far as the Dell, Lenovo, HP mini PCs goes.
>And would you say mirrored ZFS is good enough for home use?
Yes but reading your use case you probably don't want a mini PC. You can only have 1x 2.5" SSD and 2x NVMe SSD. A single 8TB NVMe SSD is currently 1000€ and you would need two. Unless you want something smaller of course.
I have a older Intel S2600CP dual Xeon board now, which still works fine, but is a huge SSI-EEB board and draws like 90W mostly idle.
I think most of my use-case could be covered by one or more mini pcs, since I mostly run stuff like Home Assistant and other small things in containers. But for storage I'm not sure what makes sense now. I went with zraid2 back then (in 2015) because I already had four of the 3TB disks, so purchasing two more was worth it for the cost and extra parity drive.
But now I'm not sure if ZFS is the right choice. I think now you can expand pools with more disks, in theory anyway, but I never tried it.
I don't know what options I should consider, and why. Unraid for example looks promising, since you can just keep adding disks.
Realistically most of what I have on the server is replaceable, I really only care about personal photos/videos/documents.
If I am replacing hardware to lower power consumption/electricity cost, spending lots of money to do so does not really make much sense. I would very much like to get 90W+ of heating power out of my home office though, it's noticeably cooler in the room if I turn off the server and other computer(s). Less spinning disks and less hardware would help with that part, but other than making the office cooler I don't think I would save that much money (initially anyway).
The disks I have are from 2015, so probably better to make a choice for hardware/disks now than having to emergency purchase one or more of them to replace failing ones.
I'd probably just buy a Synology station. Yes it's proprietary but the system itself is really good. I know a lot of people buy one just for its own photos system alone https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/photos
The problem with those is that they are insanely expensive for what you get. Here locally the DS423+ (4-bay one) is like $614 USD + shipping without any disks, and has a Intel Celeron J4125 and 2GB ram. They are unfortunately ridiculously overpriced
That's a good tip, thanks! I have a older i7-6700K machine around here somewhere, that could work. But no ECC ram, and no idea if it draws any less power in the end. Some setup with just two drives mirrored would likely work, but feels a bit risky having no parity drive
What model did you get? I've been looking at various micros on eBay/local sites, but none that I find are actually available for reasonable prices shipped to me (Norway). Finding lots of machines around ~$220 USD, but then add in $50 shipping + VAT and it adds up
