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.
I have a pi which I use as an apple tv/firestick alternative which works very well and would be pretty pointless with a larger pc imo. Servers I dont do with small PIs but indeed old computers. I think all kinds of ultra movable devices will be good with PI and derivatives.
For folks that want to get into it: pine64 is open source but I havent tried it yet. Thinking of it though. They even have a watch.
The two things to keep in mind with pine64 is that they ship hardware before the software is ready and because they are less popular there is less support.
I like there hardware but its just something to keep in mind. The good news is that to my knowledge all of their single board computers can run regular linux.
Thanks for mentioning that. Iirc they use risc-v chips and linux supports it so it should work I guess. Will check it out.
If you are unsure what to get definitely don’t get Risc-v as the user land software is not well supported.
I would get a rockpro64
I‘m hearing mixed things about risc-v. Its community supported. Do you have experience with the shortcomings?
The main shortcoming is that the software hasn’t matured yet. Its true you could use Debian or Gentoo and get a decent machine but I would hold off using it for anything important. You won’t find Risc-V images on docker hub and flathub only barely has arm support.
Got it. So except the OS, software is going to be pretty tough. Would that mean installing from source still works or not?
It should
Ok. Thanks. :)