Comment by raffraffraff

I wrote a post on my (deleted) blog back in 2022, and in it I documented some of the issues I ran into with the Raspberry pi 4 when I was building a media pc that I bolted onto the back of a TV.

Briefly, the Pi absolutely sucked in a bunch of ways compared to the MeLE Quieter 3Q that replaced it.

1. Pi couldn't use USB 7.1 audio device in the mode I needed (7.1 out + line in). No idea why, but Linux totally froze up when I selected that mode, and remained frozen until I physically unplugged the usb device. On the same USB device this worked fine on other computers. This meant that I couldn't use my external Bluetooth receiver seamlessly via the Pi.

2. YouTube failed in a bunch of ways. Seriously! Neither Chrome nor Firefox would work 100% reliably. Sound issues on most videos, awful performance, locking up the browser.

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=323640&start=...

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=151632

3. Can't be put to sleep or remotely started using Wake On LAN

4. Lacking sufficient hardware encoders/decoders

5. Everything goes through the USB bus, so you get awful storage/network performance

6. Can't use Wine to run windows apps. While this may not be an issue for many people it was for me because I wanted to use MusicBee. Wine works fine on the Pi if you've got ARM compatible windows apps. So good luck with that.

7. The hassle and cost of getting a decent case.

I ended up spending a few hundred bucks on the MeLe and everything just worked. Flawlessly. First time. And I had a wide-open choice of Linux distributions.