I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

  • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    221·
    8 个月前

    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:

    • They tried to make the Arduino easy by adding an operating system and high level programming languages such as Python. It never made much sense, why would you want to have GPIOs directly on a “computer”? not reasonable at all. Nowadays we’re seeing a raise of the ESP32 devices that have 30-40 GPIOs and Wifi for 2$ each. Cheap, easy to develop and deploy and eating away on the Pi’s market.
    • Another typical use case for a Pi is some low power server, but while it is great in theory then it lacks the CPU performance required for the container-based absurdities people want to run and the I/O sucks. USB wasn’t ever a good way to connect to storage, let alone a USB/network shared bus like we had in the past. The new PCIe is questionable (look at the NanoPi M4v2 from 2018) and requires… more adapters;
    • Price-wise it doesn’t make much sense as well because a second hand x86 will be 10x faster at the same price point… and way more stable with more expansion.

    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.

    • akrot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      8 个月前

      The mian issue with Mini/used PCs is the power efficiency. It’s just a waste of wattage and performanve/Watt is very bad, especially at idle.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        8 个月前

        I would agree to a certain point. If you get a 10th gen CPU it is power efficient and there are a lot of gamers and whatnot selling those. Also there are a lot of MiniPCs that come with mobile “T” CPU that are very decent at idle.

        • akrot@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          8 个月前

          But idle still would run much more than 15w. There a very good compilation google sheets for the most efficient X86 cpus, but once you start factoring hdds and ssds, it’s only natural to go higher (20w-30w) at least. That’s at least double than rpis

          • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            8 个月前

            But idle still would run much more than 15w

            This isn’t true.

            • HP Prodesk 400 G5 i5 9500T > idles at 4.5W
            • Optiplex Micro 3080 > idles at 7W
            • Unbranded Mini Atom C3758 > idles at 3.5W

            Either way, quick math, on a 7W range were talking about less than 10$/year to run the device.

    • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      8 个月前

      people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD

      From reading your comments I understand why. It’s in your delivery. You’re abrasive and you don’t explain why. You’re also telling people not to use something they know, to use something they don’t know, and not explaining how that would be beneficial. As far as I can see, you’ve only explained how LXD, when setup correctly, can do what Proxmox does.

      You’re essentially telling people to use something that is at best a side grade for reasons, and being salty about it.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        8 个月前

        Ahaha I don’t explain why 😂😂

        I wrote dozens of posts replying to every single question people had about LXD/Incus. Gave out printscreens, explained how it works, what it does, described useful features and pointed out multiple issues of Proxmox. I can show you what roads you can take and why but you must do the work yourself.

        The same applies to the MiniPC vs Raspberry discussion as my price, performance and feature breakdowns and proved countless times that for a large number of use cases a MiniPC is better. Unsurprisingly this is the first of such breakdowns that got upvotes, and do you know why? Because a known youtuber in this space recently came out with a video saying the exact same things I’ve been saying and now it became “acceptable” to criticize the Raspberry Pi money grab.

        to use something they don’t know, and not explaining how that would be beneficial you’ve only explained how LXD, when setup correctly, can do what Proxmox does.

        Even if that were true, what’s was the issue then? Isn’t it obvious that a true open-source solution that is available on Debian’s repos from a fresh install is better than a half proprietary solution that asks you to buy a license at any turn? Use your common sense.

        Besides my comments aren’t a marketing campaign there’s no “LXD will make you rich today and solve all your family drama” as soon as you complete our three step formula:

        1. apt install lxd
        2. lxd init
        3. lxc launch debian debian-container

        The advantage of using LXD/Incus are on the details, not on a flashy and shinny feature. It’s about running a clean Debian system, a non twisted and mangled kernel that will conflict with everything and not run stuff like OVPN properly, it’s about the license, the tools, not depending on a company, not having to wait 3x the time before your cluster is online. It’s about having a decent API for once and so many others.

        Most people say they don’t want to be put in the same situation they were put about the the CentOS/RedHat licensing change, but then they proceeded to replace CentOS with Ubuntu and still use Proxmox. All questionable open-source that is as likely to fuck you over as RedHat did.

        So eventually there will be a video from some youtuber stating that LXD/Incus is much better than Proxmox and people will flock to it without questioning anything. :)