Comment by tjoff

> Power supply dies? I can order a new one in literally seconds.

For the RPi 5, for fully reliable operation, you need an oddball 5V/5A power supply, which is not actually a standard device. IMO Raspberry Pi messed this one up. At the price point, either use a barrel jack or support USB-PD for real. (The latter would be great for many use cases, because the same conversion circuitry would enable driving from a wide voltage range. A tiny cheap ESP board can do this — why not a rather pricey Raspberry Pi?)

> Using an old second hand power supply is enough to turn me away.

It's a standard 19V laptop power supply. Any laptop supply will work with that HP device and they're just as easy to find as any other power supply.

Well for one, they have an normal HDD interface.

The worst part of a Pi is the SD card. It's truly the worst interface to use for booting off. Extremely unreliable and due to kernel bugs, having your system on an SD card is extremely unstable. (but that is more of a Linux issue than an Pi issue).

I found RPi to be unusable for anything remotely serious. Recently I got RPi 5 with NVMe hat. Had a lot of "fun" finding drive that will actually work with it, so more money and time spent. Got it working and found that it randomly dies after couple of days. The time and money spent I probably could be better off just getting one of those N100 mini PCs.

For dabbling with electronics Pico or STM32 seem more reasonable. RPi GPIO is too limited for anything that could use its processing power. Not sure if there are even any distributions that would support realtime operations with those pins or things like DMA, custom protocols working at 1x-1xx MHz speeds.

You can get new Mini PCs for not much more than a Pi 5, especially if you want an 8GB model, case etc. $150-$200 will get you an okay bottom barrel Intel PC with support for stuff like SATA and M.2 SSDs which are more annoying to have on the Pi.

The mini-pc market for those HP machines is fairly in demand and you can get them very well priced.

They're fantastic as a low cost machine with decent specs that take up minimal room, they're also usually corporate devices in which there are plenty of drivers that work well out of the box.

I bought one to act as a home server and it works flawlessly running Proxmox, over the machine I built many years back which was slower and bigger.

I just think comparing the Raspberry Pi to these Mini-PC's is just a silly comparison to begin with.

I don't see what's wrong with old second hand power supplies. These corporate mini PC's are manufactured in such large quantities, that finding them in good condition from reliable sellers isn't exactly hard.

For most self-hosting purposes mini-PC's are often the best option in my opinion, because they're small enough in size and low in power consumption to be comparable to raspi, but powerful enough for stuff like running a virtualization environment, and support containers that are only for x86. Admittedly I did go for desktop though, because I wanted more storage, dedicated GPU and ECC RAM, but for lots of people a single mini-PC could host everything.

I still like raspberry pi for doing small things where I want redundancy, like running DNS server that stays up even when I do maintenance on my main server. And obviously it's great for embedded projects and such.

Everytime I used a pi the cabling ended up being a mess. A regular computer usually have all ports on one side only, and possibly additionnal usb / trs on the other side. On the PI power/hdmi/TRS is on one side, usb/ethernet on another, GPIO on another and more easily accessible from the top. This is my major PITA concerning the PIs.

In the end most of the gains made from the small footprint are lost because the actual physical footprint increase from the number of cables you have to attach to it from all sides.

I use two of them (Lenovos) in my small homelab. They take up 1U side-by-side so they’re great if you have limited space.

> I don't see the appeal of using these mini-PCs.

Suprise - you are not the ones who do.

> Using an old second hand power supply is enough to turn me away.

> And the PI has many advantages. Power supply dies? I can order a new one in literally seconds'.

This is a quite a stupid argument.

a) it's totally the same for any other PC: you just order another 'in literally seconds'

b) if you don't like a second hand PSU then order a new one in the first place

> And meanwhile I wait for it to arrive I can use a spare notebook charger or whatever

... just like you can have a compatible charger for a mini-PC ?[0]

> For a home server I would recommend something beefier, an old desktop will be superior to any mini-pc and the Pi

For most of the people there is no need in 'beefier', 32Gb RAM, 256-1024Gb SATA/NVMe is all they need.

> The point of a Pi for me is more that you can have it where you need it. Attached to your TV or whatever.

Anyone can have mini-PC where they need it. It's because they are mini, not a desktop ones.

[0] by the way, most of the time those mini-PCs have a notebook style external PSUs (not some anemic square brick of 15W) and they are quite rare to break