I switched my home server from ARM SBCs to a $140 N100 (16GB) and honestly it’s a real improvement.
I love the original concept of the SBCs — affordable and efficient, with hardware acceleration for compute-heavy tasks. But the reality for me lately has just been more trouble than it’s worth, and running a mainline kernel on x64 is such a better experience. (I’m mostly griping at the Orange Pi I had — RPi tend to have better SW support.)
$20 more and it probably beats the snot out of the Pi performance wise and probably came in a case and with the power cables to run it…A Pi at $120 is lunacy.
Exactly. And it includeded a 500GB m2 (SATA, not NVME, but still), with a spare m2 slot available. As opposed to an SD slot + USB port…
Dual gigabit NICs and importantly can be configured to boot after power loss (which the pi of course also does).
And Intel QuickSync may not be perfect but it is well supported with mainline kernels.
Only drawback is that it draws a few extra watts compared to the Pi.