> People complaining about Raspberry Pi being too expensive versus a used and abused intel NUC being superior going to swarm this thread in 1..2..3!

You're the only one talking about it... but I mean yeah used x86 boxes do tend to beat a pi at price, performance, and software compatibility, and only lose at power consumption (unreliably, at that) and physical size.

> only lose at power consumption

Not even that. The J4125 box I have runs circles around my Pi4, was only 40€, and has a lower power consumptions (though at those levels the difference is mostly meaningless) The size is a huge difference, but as they are both in the living room cupboard (the Pi4 now runs Proxmox Backup Server), that doesn’t really make a difference for my case.

There's a reason I said the pi only won power consumption unreliably:) It's very dependent on workload (pi idles low, but under load that doesn't go as well) and the exact competition (x86 includes boards that happily run <10W, and also machines that idle in the tens of Watts:]).

But the trouble is they are too expensive. Not sure I would buy a NUC but tons of gently used/new overstock thin-client machines from Lenovo (ThinkCenter) and Dell Optiplex that cost $75-200 depending on spec and give you as good or better bang for buck, more reliable, etc.

(I would however separate out unique applications with the RPI Zero given the form factor)

At the risk of continuing this off-topic thread — the Zero 2 W is probably the sweet spot for value for the Pi right now, in terms of what you get for the price, and the utility of the device. (I'm setting one up as a PiSCSI emulator for my old Macs this week!)

Pi Connect doesn't work on the Zero 2 W though ;)

Do you know why that is? The Zero 2 W (and Pi 3) support the 64-bit verison of Raspberry Pi OS. Don't they also run Wayland? Not enough RAM?

EDIT: I should have taken a minute to check the Pi OS release notes:

> Desktop now runs on the Wayfire Wayland compositing window manager on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 platforms; on X11 using the openbox window manager on older platforms

Yeah, I think it's just a resource thing, maybe on the GPU side.

Still cheaper than NUCs and usually come new with warranty, much smaller form-factor and power requirements.

Browse some government auctions near a university and you'll buy dozens of older Dell Optiplexes for $200.

They have older CPUs, that consume more power, support limited RAM, and have power supplies that may fail anytime.

> But the trouble is they are too expensive.

Are they really?

I think we can all agree that instead of using a Raspberry Pi, you should use a computer you found in a dumpster somewhere.