There are a lot of reasons not to give them your money. They’re assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base. That’s beside the point, though, really.
It’s just not a spectacular option for hosting. In order to get a Rpi competitive with even the shittiest laptop from 7 years ago, you’re going to end up spending more than you would spend on a decent laptop from 7 years ago.
If it is a computer that turns on, it will likely function orders of magnitude better than an Rpi and won’t bind you to ARM architecture. My entire hosting setup was pulled out of a recycling pile for free. Install ubuntu/ubuntu server and enjoy yourself.
If you intend on spending any amount of money on this hobby, I cannot express enough how much I recommend against any of that money going toward a Raspberry Pi.
EDIT: A lot of you seem to be reading this as “Raspberry Pis are all nonfunctional” and getting mad about it. Don’t do that.
Edit 2: Good to see that all the stupid parts of reddit made it here
Not op but I have 3 tiny PCs and I run Linux on them. But then I don’t run windows at all because it honestly sucks.
for what…? Stealing your data, sending telemetry about how your kids play minecraft, serving up Ad’s in your start menu, forcing updates that reset your configured preference, overriding group policies, abusive licensing, trying to shove bing and edge down your throat?
No just overall experience. Everything runs better on Windows really. Anonymous usage shit doesn’t matter to me really. As for anything I need to do Windows just does it better, I don’t run into weird driver issues or update problems that cause things to crash miserably or lock me out of my boot sector with obscure errors I have to spend forever troubleshooting through a rabbit hole of forum posts and obscure nonsense. All the software I would ever need to use works fine including all the obscure stuff I have to use for work that I otherwise spend forever troubleshooting in arch, Ubuntu, mint, etc. Using wine, proton, or etc. It just works. I could plug any USB device in on Windows and get a little pop-up that says “you dude your shits ready to roll” and it’s good. I used Linux for 15 years or so on and off and I was vehemently pro Linux like you are but dude it really does suck. Only way it works is if someone develops a distro with exacting, specific hardware in mind and tests it for a good couple years then releases it for others to use with the exact same hardware. Cases like Chromebooks, steam decks, Enterprise mainframes and servers. Yeah, that’s fine, someone is putting in the time and effort to build specifically for this things. As for everything else, if you want shit to work and get your day to day work done as a grown up, not a great situation unless you somehow hit some sweetspot of hardware config that will supported. Otherwise most of your computing time is gonna be spent getting your computer actually functional