Is it $60 or less? Everytime one of these alternative boards with an assload of more features pops up, nobody bothers to mention the price. Obviously we could spend more money to get more features, that's what spending more money does. You can't replace something without actually offering an alternative. The pi's biggest selling point was that it was cheaper than a steak dinner. If you dont match or beat that, you aren't actually competing with the pi.
It looks like it's ~$100. But when I've used similar SBCs in the past the issue ends up being drivers. Even if something is faster and better specced than a RasPi, you end up outside that ecosystem with very little in the way of support for whatever oddball hardware your board has.
I have a BananaPi M3 and the software support was horrific. Getting a kernel to compile with the hacked drivers and firmware was like black magic.
Orange pi worked quite well but I mostly used python & GPIO.
Oh yeah, I had to debug and recompile that GPIO lib so no it was kind of not very user friendly...
For $100 you can buy a micro form factor Optiplex PC which has several orders of magnitude more computing power, but it does have a bit larger form factor and less ports than what OP listed.
SBCs in the past the issue ends up being drivers. (...) outside that ecosystem with very little in the way of support for whatever oddball hardware your board has.
The RPi does have a nice ecosystem but the trick is to pick a board supported by Armbian - that will ensure future kernel updates and low level things working fine. For instance I've been using a NanoPi M4v2 since 2018 with a RK3399 CPU mind that at that time it already had a PCIe x2 interface, 4GB of RAM and was cheaper than the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ from the same year that had Ethernet shared with the USB bus.
This and support. My dad could set up a pi, and he doesn’t know what a kernel is or how to compile.
Thanks for saying this. It's features at price point.
"It's better than the Pi at only 3x the price."
And what's with the "Avoid the Raspberry PI" sentiment? They are hard to get (?). I've been using the Pi for forever, and have zero 'product' complaints that would make me want to "Avoid the Pi'. If anything, I have plans for more. Again, the price - A Zero2W is $15 MSRP. For $15, You can put that in everything. A Pi4 is $35. Its just a great deal.
Current prices for the 8gb pi5 are around £80 which is about $100, and it won't ship until some-when next year.
"More reasons to Avoid the Raspberry Pi"
I didn't know we even had reasons to avoid it
What if you really hate support and ease of finding images online?
There's definitely an argument for not supporting the Pi Foundation with their anti-consumer practices over the last few years. They've sold out to corporate interests and don't give a shit about the educational/hobbyist mission of the original Raspberry Pi.
I think the reasons are they are pushing a competing product.
There aren't really any reasons to avoid it. There are certainly reasons to choose an alternative product, namely the complete unavailability of 4B and 5 boards. My biggest issue so far is that the alternatives offer features that I don't want, or have a price that's way too high for a SBC
Straight up some of those single board computers cost so much that I've just considered getting an old mini office PC
They're really capable and can be had for like $100
Yeah, unless you need the GPIO or the lower power consumption of a Pi, mini PCs are better for 90% of the projects people use single board computers for. Plus you usually get upgradable ram, and more-resilient storage.
My experience with Banana PIs is that they require some obscure kernel to run because the developers cannot be bothered to bring their hardware support and drivers upstream. Same was true for uboot. Has any of that changed in the meantime? If not, that this is a no go for me.
Yeah, this is an absolute blocker for me. If its not supported upstream then it's a no-go. I don't want to be running whatever hacked up Ubuntu image the manufacturer put together then stopped updating in 3 months when the next iteration gets churned out
It's the same, I picked up an Orange Pi 5 plus on sale and didn't even think about the kernel and module driver situation. It's rough. Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip and the other contributors do great work to un-fuck the situation and get a non-screwy ubuntu install cobbled together, but in the comments for issues even he gives off a "well, the situation is shit" sort of vibe.
I won't buy another rockchip sbc.
Yeah, I figured. I'll stick to the Raspberries then, mainly because the "just work"™
That's too bad because the specs OP listed are pretty great plus I'd love to see the Raspberry Pi Foundation (or whichever corporate entity controls production and sales) knocked down a few pegs due to their anti-consumer behavior over the last several years.
Yeah they are a massive fuck around unless you already know how
I had the same impression until I dusted off my banana pi one last month and there was an up-to-date armbian image for it. Totally pleasant surprise.
Fair, but I'm not running armbian, so my requirements boils down to: Must run any up to date Linux distro without having to side-load custom kernels or anything. Should work out of the box.
Does it’s run upstream Debian or SUSE? No? A custom distribution with proprietary binary blobs and no updates after one year you say? Sounds shit.
This is the only question that really matters. If it's overpriced? meh, it's a cheap alternative to a NUC. But if it's going to be stuck on obsolete software forever, run.
Good specs, but the rpi still has the absolute big advantage of it's vast field of available turnkey software.
There is a big difference between "it works out of the box" and "it works so-so after a lot of fiddling, and I still don't know why".
Also GPU drivers.
If you're mad at NVidia for their closed-source drivers, then remember that ARM seldom makes their Linux drivers available for free, so you have to either have to deal with absolutely no GPU driver while the CPU does the graphics rendering (might not be a big deal on a NAS though), or with open source drivers that are less capable than the Nouveau drivers and even fiddlier to install. The ARM Mali driver issue is so bad I was legit thinking on a solution to run the Android binary blobs (which at least are available by ripping them off from the Android kernel) on regular Linux, a lot of function call redirects would likely take care of that issue.
What an unpleasant and unnecessary turn of phrase .
It's the software, stupid!
I dunno, this is going to be expensive, unless you need the GPIO or the smallest size possible I'm not sure what the advantage is over spending $150 or so on one of those mini Intel N100 boxes with dual 2.5GbE, they are x86 so can easily run normal software like Opnsense or similar without worrying about support going away down the road.
Or without 2.5GbE just one of those $60-80 8th gen Dell/Lenovo/HP USFF PCs off ebay.
SBCs just don't seem very competitive currently because they're quite expensive for what you get, and require specialized software releases, plus stuff like hardware transcoding never seems very well supported even though the chip can technically do it.
Hopefully it’ll beat pi4 prices as well
If you're looking for cheap... what would recommend is instead a Mini-PC like the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 DM or the Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro.
For a small NAS and self-host a few services even an old laptop will do it, however there are advantages to picking a mini PC. Those machines are quiet, don’t require much power and some can even fit a 2.5" hard drive so you won’t need external hard drive enclosures. More on that later.
For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.
Aside from the big brands like HP and Dell there are other alternatives such as the trendy MINISFORUM however their BIOS comes out of the factory with weird bugs and the hardware isn’t as reliable - missing ESD protection on USB in some models and whatnot.
So it costs more up front, and it uses more electricity which costs more in the long term.
I don't need all the extra Pi accessories, I already have cables and chargers and SD cards. So for me, the price of a Pi is just the price of a Pi.
100$ isn't cheaper than 55$. That's 200% more than the pi. If someone is looking for a pi because of the price, a 100$ computer isn't an option.
Thank you for your detailed suggestion.
I’ve got HP ProDesk 600 G5 Mini i5-9500T off ebay for $190. Best damn purchase ever. Running 21 docker containers and transcode 4k with ease while consuming only 35w.
However, sometimes you need GPIOs especially for school projects.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters | More Letters |
---|---|
IP | Internet Protocol |
LTS | Long Term Support software version |
NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
PCIe | Peripheral Component Interconnect Express |
PSU | Power Supply Unit |
RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC |
SBC | Single-Board Computer |
SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
[Thread #294 for this sub, first seen 22nd Nov 2023, 14:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Well, I do kinda want a new router (but would also need to switch from opnsense to openwrt).
Unless it can natively run all the existing ready-to-go Pi images and software packages and will also receive community support when I ask for help in a Pi-adjacent forum it's not really going to be a competitor to the Pi. The hardware is pretty much irrelevant.
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