[joshstrange]

And they are promptly out of stock, I assume.

I've owned every Raspberry Pi since the first one but I think the 4 was my last one. They are fun to tinker with with but not great for long-term use in my experience. I felt like I had to babysit it way too often, it absolutely wasn't a "setup an forgot" device, again in my experience. It'd be rock solid for 2-3 months then randomly stop working, rinse and repeat.

A little bit back I bought a cheap (~$250) mini pc to run Home Assistant on and I haven't looked back. The Raspberry Pi 4 did decent at that job but was a little flakey for my liking and I even had a special case with an m.2 adapter so I didn't have to use the SD card. And before "$XX < $200" (whatever these are going for now), I spent over $100 for my RPi 4 (top ram, I think 4? or was it 8?) especially since you need a case, power supply, etc. Also I had to buy a m.2 ssd and that special adapter.

EDIT: I don't doubt that some of you don't have stability issues and/or have a Raspberry 1 that's been running since release without issue. That just wasn't my experience. Maybe that's my fault, I don't know. I know that I bought "raw" boards, kits from multiple suppliers, and expensive cases that came with approved power supplies but without fail in a couple months it wouldn't be pingable/ssh-able and I'd have to power cycle it and sometimes the software on it would just lock up (same software wouldn't have issue on my home server). In the end maybe I'm an idiot or not smart enough to manage a RPi but especially after the stock issues not too long ago and who the RPi Foundation prioritized, coupled with my experience of the hardware, I'm not really interested in the platform.

[esskay]

I've used Pi's dating back to the first one (even had one from the first batch manually packaged up by Eben and co). They're good, but arent without their issues. Power management has been a consistent problem with every single Pi. That combined with the Raspberry Pi Trading Co's behaviour over the last couple of years made me move to alternatives.

Once an 8GB pi cost more than an i3 or i5 mini pc that is capable of being upgraded it became completely pointless even considering them.

The only things I now have running on Pi's is my PiHole on an old Pi 2 - it's been flawless for years, and a Pi 3 that handles humidity detection in the utility room and turns on an extractor fan.

[duffyjp]

I'm with you on this. I have the Pi Zero W and Pi Zero 2 W. These are IMO the ideal devices in their lineup. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for when computers had limitations but I love them. I have the old one running PiHole, (so DNS stays up if I reboot my server) and the other doing monitoring. I've had zero problems doing everything over wifi, and actually being wifi is a benefit for my internet monitoring since wifi going down on my mandatory AT&T router wouldn't be captured by an ethernet connected device.

[ThatPlayer]

I also like the Pi 3A+ as an in-between. Especially before the release of the Zero2 as the Zero1's CPU was a bit too weak.

[nirav72]

Pi Zero 2 W are still hard to find. Even though the Rpi 4 supplies have gotten better in the past few months.

[tjoff]

https://rpilocator.com/

It's been in stock for months every time I cared to look.

[nirav72]

Looks like only 1 U.S seller has it in stock. The others have the Zero W. Not the 2. But thanks, I hadn't looked at the rpilocator in a while and was waiting for my local Microcenter to get them.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Once an 8GB pi cost more than an i3 or i5 mini pc

But the Pi probably costs less once you factor in energy costs, no?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Depends on workload and the machine; some x86 machines are sufficiently low power that pis lose their advantage.

[doublepg23]

X86 machines have had perfectly fine idle wattages for ages now. I’m not sure why people think an x86 machine is sucking 50W at all times or something.

[accrual]

Anecdata: I have a netbook from around 2009 with an Atom processor. Default clock is 1.6 GHz but I ran it at 800 MHz. With an SSD inside, it sips power and ran 24/7 basic web services for years.

[cptcobalt]

no actual data here: no power (Watts) provided for the netbook to enable a fair comparison.

It's great that it did not become ewaste, and a computer you have is better than one you don't have, but people likely shouldn't pick up old netbooks over something like a pi.

[accrual]

I agree. The machine is remote so I don't have it on hand, but I believe the stock AC adapter is rated for 40 watts according to a search online. However, I haven't recently plugged it into my Kill-A-Watt to see the actual draw, especially since I run it at half frequency. I'll bring it with me next time I'm out there for an upgrade to see what it actually pulls. :)

[piyh]

It's because ATX PSU desktops have high idle whereas a laptop, embedded device, or ATX12VO doesn't. People mean different power delivery methods and bundle it all up under x86 vs ARM

[duffyjp]

I tried measuring the wattage of my Pi Zero W when I got it but my Kill-A-Watt just registered 0 even when running stress -c 1. ;)

[dgacmu]

You can measure it with an inline USB power meter. They generally run between half a watt idle and 2 watts depending on what you're doing (using a camera, Wi-Fi, and keeping the CPU busy) and if you've shut down things like the video output and LEDs to try to save power.

[esskay]

A lot of it depends on what you use it for, in my usecase I've kept the two Pi's I mentioned as they sip a tiny amount of power. The Lenovo Thinkcentre I've got sits idle at around 7w but it's running a fair few service I use for dev work throughout the day, and the Pi would struggle to cope.

If you used one for something equivilent to a pihole then I think yes it would cost more over time, although we're likely talking many years of 24/7 runtime for it to then become more expensive, the low power x86 chips are a lot more efficient than they used to be.

[starik36]

> wasn't a "setup an forgot" device

It absolutely is. I have 4 RPi devices in the house actively doing work and I only touch them when I need to change a feature or something like that.

1. Front end to my 3D printer - RPi 2.

2. Magic Mirror - RPi 4.

3. Front end to my ancient HP LaserJet to make it wireless - RPi Zero W

4. Detector for Dryer finishing and sending me a text message - RPi Zero 2 W

These require no babysitting whatsoever.

[Rebelgecko]

All of my Pis have shat the bed after 3-5 years and had to be reimaged. I assume it's a combination of power outages + SD card lifetimes

[starik36]

My RPi 2 with the 3D printer has been operating with no problem since 2017 or something like that. The RPi Zero W with the HP LaserJet since around 2019.

Fingers crossed, it's been fantastic reliability.

[dgacmu]

How do you tell when the dryer is finished?

[starik36]

I bought a Kasa Smart Plug (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LN3C7WK). It has an API for reporting energy usage. Luckily there was already a library (https://github.com/python-kasa/python-kasa) for calling this API. I wrote a small console app that checks energy usage and when I detect a drop, I know that the dryer is done. Then the app uses Twilio to send me a text message.

This is my second attempt at solving this problem. In the first incarnation, I attempted to do audio recognition for the sound that the dryer makes when its done, but I just couldn't get it to work well. The sound was too short to generate a good signature.

[dgacmu]

Ah, that's a nice way, thank you!

[spiderfarmer]

I have 3 pi’s, running piVPN, piHole and homebridge as well as 2 displays that show my website activity and statistics. They only broke one SD card in 6 years and I never tinker with them.

[joshstrange]

I haven't used homebridge in 2 years at least but that was one the least reliable pieces of software in my experience. I've seen people online talk about how it's rock solid for them and others talk about how it's flakey. I'm in the latter camp. After the 3rd or 4th time I had to re-add everything to the Home app after my "hub" went sideways I gave up and transferred the 1 plugin I maintained to someone else since I stopped using it. I even ran homebridge on docker as well as my a RaspberryPi but never had good luck.

[rcarmo]

Like I wrote multiple times before here, I stopped having stability issues with the Raspberry Pi 2 and have had very few issues with SD cards.

I have Pis that have been running for 3+ years now (and that haven't been running longer because I upgraded them to Pi 3 or 4 boards, although they are performing the same jobs), and it's not just the OS either - I have Raspbian on the Pi 3 that runs my desktop touchscreen monitor (which controls all my lighting, and has an uptime of 167 days), and Ubuntu on my Homebridge/Zigbee gateway (which has an uptime of 61 days because I upgraded it before Summer, but has been running for nearly 2 years now).

If you need more CPU power, the RK3588 boards (as long as they have proper Armbian support) are decent bets, but at that point an Intel N100 might be more interesting since those CPUs can average below 10W on light load and will boost to better overall performance. Yes, they will be more expensive, but the going rate is 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for less than $200, so...

But if you want something that just works _forever_ at under 5W mean load, the Pi 4 is still it. And you can boot it off an USB SSD to great effect (I have a Proxmox instance running that way).

[larme]

Like I said in another thread, I use a rpi zero2 as the backup of a VPS so I can program on it with my iPad even no internet is available. The reasons I use it is that:

1. You can configure the zero2 so that when it is connected to the iPad with a usb cable, 2 machine will construct an ethernet over usb and you can mosh from iPad to zero2 without any external network. zero2 also get both the data and power from a single usb cable

2. zero2 is cheap to replace. Micro sd card is cheap and easy to be cloned. You don't worry about software or hardware loss.

3. zero2 is actually quite usable in headless/ssh mode. I used to do the same thing on zero1 and it's a little bit sluggish.

I actually have my entire setup stored in a mint tin box.

[tallanvor]

I have two Pi 3Bs that have been running as VPN hosts for two years now. I ssh in about once a month to verify that updates are applied, and they've just worked without a problem.

Where I've had problems with other Pis has mostly come down to power supplies that don't deliver enough power. Getting a properly sized power supply will likely solve a lot of your issues.

[CyberDildonics]

I've had a pi 4 running pi hole untouched for multiple years.

[joshstrange]

YMMV, that's why I stressed "in my experience". I'm aware some people find them rock solid, I'm just not one of those people.

I have docker containers running on my local app server that I literally never think about and have been humming away without issue for years (aside from server restarts or updates which I rarely need to do and it's often as easy as a `docker pull`). That's what I'm looking for, if it requires any more interaction then I'd rather pay more. I'm not saying "my time is worth so much" exactly, it's not like every hour of my day is packed full and I couldn't do some more server admin but I don't want to do that. I have the money (which isn't really all that much more) to avoid it so I do.

It's the same way that in my early 20's I cobbled together local storage servers full of shucked hard drives to save money and now I pay for a Synology and raw drives. I just don't want to spend my free time doing that anymore.

[blacksmith_tb]

The care-and-feeding argument is absolutely legit, I have made several things over the years with RPi-s that were great until they weren't. Like an air quality monitor / logger which ran fine for a couple of years, until the sensor conked out, I replaced it with a turnkey one that's worked fine - though I am sure its sensor will also give up eventually, that's just the nature of them). Or a chiming clock that drove a servo to strike a doorbell chime, the little cheap hobby servos burned out after a couple years, bigger ones introduced more complicated power setups, and bashed the chime harder than was needed. But I also have a couple of Zero W-s which have been running fine for quite a while, the key for them, aside from simpler hardware, was the 'overlay file system' which loads into RAM only, so the sd cards don't get trashed writing logfiles etc.

[cfr2023]

You have perfectly described my approach to tech tasks that lack intrinsic joy or interest

[eropple]

Mine runs the Unifi controller and PiHole on a Pi 3 and it has survived, untouched, across four separate moves. Helps to properly tune logging to not over-wear the SD card.

My three Orange Pi 5's are in my home k8s cluster (mostly as local GitHub Actions arm64 builders, but also have m.2 storage for Longhorn and run the occasional one-off) will probably tick along without being looked at again for years.

[deepspace]

Absolutely. I dumped most of my PIs for older mini-PCs and NUCs. Throw in a bit more RAM and run Proxmox on it. Way better stability, functionality, and manageability.

If you have 3 of those, you can run a Proxmox cluster, which is a godsend for applications like Home Assistant, which require stability and uptime.

The only time I use a Pi these days is when I need to interface with something via the GPIO pins. Netbooting increases the reliability vastly.

[nanidin]

Interesting, my experience with pihole has been basically set it and forget it for several years now.

With BirdNET-pi, I have had a few hiccups due to the SD cards getting worn out from constant writing.

[LeafItAlone]

What SD cards do you use?

[nanidin]

I’m not sure what’s in the pihole and I’m afraid to pull it out but probably Sandisk class 10 in that one.

In the BirdNET-pi I used whatever came in the CanaKit which I’m not even sure if it was branded. I gave that to my parents and my dad replaced it and hasn’t had problems since then.