[aksss]

There are reasons to prefer a Pi over a used mini PC, but it is not reliability. The fact is that with Pis or PCs, _if_ you're still running after a week, you're highly, highly, likely to survive past the point of usefulness.

Reasons to prefer a pi over a mini PC - easy access to GPIO pins; small(er) form factor; power efficiency; lower weight; still cost if you can work with zeros.

Reasons to prefer a mini PC over a Pi - price to performance ratio is often far, far better; size is "good enough" for people just after a small computer (rather than an electronics project, POC, etc); you are, in fact, reducing ewaste.

In short, if you just need something to run Home Assistant or Plex on ProxMox or similar, you would find more reward in a mini PC than a Pi, particularly in performance.

The bias at play is that people see "old" and equate it with "bad performance". That heuristic only works when comparing like for like - yesterday's mini-PC to today's mini-PC.

[cdt5050]

The biggest reasons to prefer a Pi over a mini PC: the documentation, Raspberry Pi Press, the community, the ecosystem.

Let's put it this way: you pop in your SD card, set up a username/password, a few other settings, and you end up with a system that already has Geany and Thonny installed. Go to Help -> Bookshelf and find all the issues of MagPi and Hackspace for inspiration and learning, and a couple dozen books like "Essentials - Code Music with Sonic Pi" or "Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico". Search "Raspberry Pi Hats" and get a lifetime worth of reading and learning there, hitting just about any domain you could care about.

The vision of the Raspberry Pi wasn't to create a cheap, tiny PC, it was to create a learning platform, of which the cheap, tiny PC is the basis. More than any other computing device I've seen, it really lives up to that vision.

[justin66]

> The fact is that with Pis or PCs, _if_ you're still running after a week, you're highly, highly, likely to survive past the point of usefulness.

I might be hopelessly biased since you would regard me as someone who keeps using computers when they are "past the point of uselessness," which is not a phrase I'd actually use.

A lot of the stuff I do to keep computers running after a long period of ownership does not even apply to the Pi, which is nice. I won't ever have to replace the fans on one of my Pis (the case design of the prototype Pi 5s we've seen notwithstanding), but that's a standard thing on PCs. There's maybe one capacitor on a Pi's board? I've never needed to think about it. I've guiltily thrown away and replaced soft power supplies on PCs, even though I had a friend once who knew how to fix them and I should really learn to do the same, but there's considerably less guilt when it's a USB wall wart. I've pitched a few SD cards belonging to Pis over the years (never the proper SSDs, though) but that has never been nearly as painful as a drive failure in a PC.

So I guess I'm saying I would factor in the maintenance burden.

> The bias at play is that people see "old" and equate it with "bad performance".

I see "used electronics" and "eBay" and think of "wasted time," "frustration," "incompetence," "shamelessness," and "fraud."

The other thing I would factor in is that my time is worth something and eBay's main goal, when it comes to used electronics, is to waste it.

> In short, if you just need something to run Home Assistant or Plex on ProxMox or similar, you would find more reward in a mini PC than a Pi, particularly in performance.

I'd split the difference here and say I'd be happy to run Home Assistant on a Pi and Plex, quite possibly, on a PC (but I'd want to at least test on a Pi). I'd be happy to buy a new PC for the purpose from a trusted retailer, or build it myself.