I picked up a little mini-PC for cheap. Smaller than a Mac Mini, 16 GB of RAM, 500 GB of SSD, and an i5. I'm running Pop_OS #linux on it, and I have to say, so far, it's been a fun little machine.
My original plan was to use a pi4 as a fun little linux project, but I just didn't have the patience for it. I don't mind if an old computer is slow, but if I'm using something with a 'modern' OS, I need it to be snappy. I tried just about every distro on the pi and they all seemed...laggy.
@thom_ftc how much ram did your model have? I have a couple of the 8gbs but have not given them a try yet.
I was just sshing into a pi4 with 4gb ram and for that limited purpose it was fast, but I didn’t hook it up to a monitor up long enough to see how laggy or not it was.
@derickflorian The pi4 has 4GB of memory. It's a great little machine for CLI work, but I think asking it to run a modern GUI with the same sort of response time as a full-fledged machine is probably unfair. Also, I recognize that this is 100% a "I'm spoiled by modern computing" problem, and not a real indictment of the pi.
This mini-PC is essentially just an Intel laptop without the screen/keyboard/trackpad, so it's actually giving me the experience I was looking for.
@thom_ftc definitely! It is an incredible machine considering the price. I was kind of hoping to replace my laptop with the pi as it ages. I don’t know how much I would rate the responsiveness.
The one thing I was kind of worried about was the reliability of the SD card over time. I have read that they are not as durable as a regular hard drive but have not used one long enough yet to see it fail.
@derickflorian I used one as my 'basement server' for quite a while. I ended up replacing it with a small form factor i7 machine that I picked up from my local university's surplus earlier this year. That was mostly about setting up a stable Minecraft server for my daughter while not wanting the entire laundry room filled with computing devices.
When I first got the pi, SD boot was the only option. I never had any issues, but did switch to a USB drive when that option became available.