Hand it over to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

No, and even with the Pis, that woud be only the Pi Zero/Zero 2 range. I bought Andromeda Pi (Pi4 8GB) right before COVID and the board alone generally ran $64 for that model (less for 1, 2, 4 GB) but that was before mandatory accessorise; Andromeda's kit was $115 therabouts.

The only equivalentish board with low overhead is the BeagleBone Black (~$65 for the board, ~$10 for the case, ~$7 for the power, ~$8 for the sd card = ~$90). It has eMMC but only 4GB (you can actually run from that but only Single Project use cases) or you use sd card. I will say, either sd cards have improved tremendously since I first ran my Pi's off them or Beagle and Pi Zero 2 are witches, because other than during initial install/updates (which yeah, is slow as hell) or running some heavy work, response time is fine. On my Black, boot is roughly equal to my Pis who all run on the fastest usb drives I could find or a dedicated NVME. My Play is the fastest going off eMMC (it has 16 GB so I can run from it), but that's 'holy shit' territory so I don't use it as a baseline for anyone else.

In case anyone ever needs this: Silicon Power 3D NAND is almost shockingly fast. I got the rec off a tech website, invested $8, and was indeed shocked. Boot time is great. I haven't gone above 64 GB cards, though.

I'm testing the SAMSUNG PRO Plus, which also seems to be performing amazingly, but the size (128 GB) is still giving me pause.

Completely subjective experience: above 64 GB, sd cards seem to slow down faster regardless of how much data you actually have on them. I could be imagining it, but that feeling goes back to before Pi's were bootable from USB.

I consider SBCs drastically overhyped these days. RaspberryPi was nice enough when it was released a decade ago, but these days you can just get a Beelink or similar miniPC, which is much more capable and often even cheaper. It doesn’t have the GPIO, but even if you need that, you are generally better served with a cheap MCU connected to USB.

I would put it another way; they're ideal for You Have One Vital Job Only projects; Home Assistant and Pihole are my two specific,, but robotics, a router, even a dedicated NAS would be a use case. I could run a lot of things on a mini PC with a hypervisor--soon, I shall start be experimenting with that--but One Vital Job Only projects are ones that do their thing without me ideally ever noticing them other than maintenance, if that makes sense. And even more important, things I should not tinker with because they're just fine, which is why I ended up building a second, dedicated Media Server/media ripping/encoding/NAS machine; once I did that, I finally had a stable media library I could access for more than a month at a time before I got An Idea That Would Be Fun and Oops Time To Reinstall (seriously; before I built that machine, I had to run my media and plex from a Pi (aka One Vital Job) because if I put it on my main machine, I'd tinker it to death; hence, separate everything. I am basically hiding the cookies from a three year old and I am the three year old).

Tentatively--and this applies to a much smaller population--they're perfect for deconstructing the Linux kernel and operating systems in general because you get to work at a reduced scale. I have the repository for the Pi kernel in my bookmarks and go to just read through it and get familiar when I have some time or if I remember something I want to look for (my usb wifi dongle testing project was invaluable for how much kernel homework I had to do, it's hilarious). I know and can write in basic C++, I know how to compile, but I still don't pretend to understand the kernel; with the Pi's scale, though, I can grasp it, if that makes sense. I can recognize the structure and begin to get how things fit together. I can even--tentatively--find specific parts, identify drivers, especially when it comes to specific removable hardware where it's fairly obvious and easy to follow (following actual driver files....that's in progress). My goal before I die is to be able to read and follow the entire kernel end to end; I think I'm going to need to look into the benefits of reincarnation or cryogenics admittedly, but hope springs eternal.

(BeagleBones--if nothing else--has seriously upped my game on Figure It Out For Yourself. Which yes is a very me-specific use case, requires more homework to get context than literally every class I'm taking combined including TCP/IP class, and I literally don't have time to do in more than sprints, but did lead to me literally being able to making my first Universal New Install Checklist (covers every Linux operating system I've ever used including all my personal configurations and scripts, in order, with all exceptions) and my first foray into creating an auto-install-and-configure script I can run on a new machine. Yes, those Beagles had me doing a clean install that many times. No idea what I'm doing there and I really wish there was a universal template for that.)

Having said that, I haven't jumped into MiniPC/hypervisor culture so I am up for changing my mind the minute I make the leap. And seriously, this thread has moved it actively up my priority list, which I did not see coming, so thank you for that.

My dude, that is beautiful I now need to google C.H.I.P to see what's going on. And yeah, my Black is seriously solid.

Main forum: https://forum.beagleboard.org/ for ARM64 boards; https://forum.beagleboard.org/t/arm64-debian-11-x-bullseye-monthly-snapshots-2023-07-01/32318 for the rest: https://forum.beagleboard.org/t/debian-11-x-bullseye-monthly-snapshot-2023-07-01/31280

There's also a discord, linked in the forum. Hit me up if you want my link collection for Beagle: I started bookmarking literally anywhere that I went that looked vaguely relevant.

That is a lesson I learned dipping into BeagleBoard and it's driving me insane.

Like, the BeagleBone Black and BeaglePlay are extremely solid SBCs; the Black, which I run off an SD card, is incredibly solid and the Play is--I mean, reading the specs it may literally be able to do anything. They're also easy to get and at a reasonable price point. But the ecology and documentation, even the official Getting Started page, are nightmare fuel and by the way, do not use those instructions as they are broken and the associated OS is three years old. If you google enough, however, you may eventually realize you have to go to the forums and find the two threads where the latest OS updates--as in, this month--are being posted or go to the individual documentation linked off of the board, where you will probably find up something like a workflow or will give you enough for some extrapolation.

There are attempts to get the OS and kernel up to date and integrate them with Beagle-specific packages and cape firmware, but this is not just like a whole bunch of separate groups doing different things not talking to each other; it's like they don't even know the other groups exist when everyone is technically working on the same projects. It's depressing.

I am seriously regretting that I haven't bought more SBCs so I could give you an informed opinion and I desperately hope someone answers this.

With my Pi and Beagle limitations: the Pi Zero 2 with an ethernet hat and battery hat or power block would probably do it; the hats aren't hugely expensive and if there's one thing the Pi ecosystem has in abundance, it has cases for eveyrthing (Argon has a jawdropping modular case design for the Pi Zero; it's like art and that costs more than even the ridiculously inflated price of a Pi Zero 2, which is saying something). Right now, it's also--for what it is--overpriced. I'm trying to decide if the BeaglePlay would be worth your time to look into; it has wifi, bluetooth, ethernet and single-pair ethernet and integrates with Freedom Connect but it's very new, the documentation is bad to literally non-existent, you'd need to custom build the case, and it's design seems geared toward IoT, automation, monitoring and controlling remote sensors with any existing network protocol, and existing as a vague super cool enigma I am still not sure what to do with as it has a lot of onboard functionality built in and no idea how to use most of it.

I am totally watching this thread for people's suggestions.

Friend, this reply is beautiful. And reading the Zima site, I may be sold. What do you use to run the network? OpenWRT, DDWRT, Tomato?

And forget about trying to transcode Blu-ray rips, which most of my devices can’t stream natively, so transcode is the only option.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am unqualified to advise on anything; thanks to COVID, I got deathly into making a media server and ran into the transcoding problem followed by making a spreadsheet and experimenting and documenting my results.

My results (other can disagree): all my transcoding problems came down to audio streams and subtitles. None of this may apply to you, but just in case.

I approached it from three points: a.) I got the NVIDIA Pro to run Plex as NVIDIA can handle anything; b.) I made a server just for my media processing and storage (it also runs Plex as a secondary instance when my Shield is in use). I use MakeMKV for the raw rip into an mkv container with all audio streams. The rip I process through Handbrake so I can get as close to a clone as I can (4K to 4K, 1080p to 1080p, etc) with full original audio then make a copy of each and every audio stream into the equivalent container that was compatible with the sound limitations of whatever I was planning to stream it on. Example: my Sonos speakers wanted Dolby: DTS 7.1 to TrueHD. I also did a third copy of each stream into the equivalent AAC containers: TrueHD to AAC 7.1 to future proof. I also added a fourth copy that's a basic AAC 2.0 that rolls with anything; and c.) Subtitles: turn them off and use open subtitles files so no one has to deal with bitmaps. I tested through Plex to make sure, and watched for the switch from direct play to transcode, then reverified on my Windows machine, etc.

Yes, it will eat hard drive space like whoa--uncompressed audio streams do that--but with surprisingly few exceptions, I can get direct play for 4K on pretty much anything now, not just Plex. I also create multiple resolutions using either original rip 4K or original rip 1080p as source but with the same audio mapping (that's a me-thing and also, Covid). I know this sounds like a ridic amount of work, but once I set all the profiles, it's basically a batch job. My total movie library sits at 400 movies with about 1200 files; last year I re-audited my Handbrake profiles, deleted everything but my source rips (and actually did a mass re-rip on the older ones that I did before I started compiling the latest ffmpeg to use when compiling MakeMKV), and re-encoded everything using those profiles. Total time was about two weeks end to end; I did them in batches of fifty and checked in every six hours to move completed files back into my media drives and also restart.

The only ones now that need me to personally go in and make corrections are the remastered releases like Apocalypse Now and Scarface (my files were twice the size of the original, it was unreal). Every one of them rips huge and needs slightly different profile tweaks, so those I oversee personally.

I don't know if any of this is relevant to your setup, but I reverified running Plex on one of my Pis and it could direct play at least 90% of the 4K and anything lower, and the 4K problems seem to all be with those remasters.

My dude, you made me google, but fine; RockPro on Ameridroid is on my short list. I've been meaning to follow up on that one, so bookmarked the homepage.

What do you use it for?

Watch Vilros and American Raspberry Pi Shop; that's where I picked up my Zero 2 and second Pi 4 8GB respectively. I tend to like Vilros better; they're fairly consistent in regularly getting stock, you just have to check in consistently to catch it. The Zero 2 was an actual fluke; I was evangelizing about the Pihole to a friend and went to the site to show her what to buy and the Zero 2 was right there.

Canakit's good too, but somehow, I am always coming in right after pre-orders close, which is weird, as the one thing you cannot say about me is I am not focused as hell (the COVID Switch and NVIDIA Shortage was very educational on how to stalk merchandise into submission).

Truthfully, for a Pihole, you really don't need a Pi 4; my Zero 2 runs it with resources to spare (the regular zero technically could, but there was more than one bottleneck).

I got into Linux after doing my first end to end build of a pc, I needed an OS, and I wanted to learn basically how to build a server for my own amusement.

Here are the benefits: literally ninety-nine percent of everything else in the world is or seems to be based on Linux or it and Linux dated at some point. The best programs for ripping/encoding movies are on Linux. If you want to build a home media server or do home automation: Linux. If you want an easy, cheap NAS: Linux. Network wide ad blocker: Linux. You can do all of these on the same machine at the same time and it will be 'let's go' and it can do it on surprisingly lower resources than Windows ever will. Once you're comfortable with Linux, there's a massive range of things you wanted to do or didn't even know you wanted to do but Windows made difficult or expensive or inconvenient that are ridiculously easy to do. Even something as simple as doing backups to your primary machine are suddenly low stress. This is why when getting my friends into it, I tell them to use an old PC or laptop and go: every time--every time--they're like "I've been wanting to do X and it's right here" and me "yeah, I know, welcome to a much less frustrating digital life".

If you can't or won't for whatever reason transition fully from Windows; you don't have to. It makes life with Windows monumentally easier as you can lower your expectations on what it will do and leave it for things that for whatever reason, it has to do. Linux fits itself into your life, you don't have to carve out spaces and overthink way too much to make a space compatible with Windows.

For me, the biggest benefit: I have ADHD and depression and was and still am perpetually bored combined with low grade misery. I combat that with learning new things, setting up projects to do, anything to occupy my mind. Linux is amazing: there's always something new to learn and to do, because it can do anything. I want to learn how routers work; flash a router to DD-WRT and go. Get into advanced terminal and command line: Ubuntu Server, Arch, or Slackware, let's go.. Home Automation looks interesting: there's an entire OS for that or I can run it in a container on my primary machine. I know what a container is and how to use it: awesome. Media Server, NAS? I've built them on single board computers and run them or I throw them on the same machine: Linux can do that.

Here's the funny part: I went back to school to get a degree in Software Dev and decided actually, I may get three; I was barely a mid-passing student the x decades ago I tried this education thing. Since I restarted, everything is just--easy. Someone gave me a scholarship, which is insane. I tutor people, for fucks' sake; its weird. At work, I started getting much more advanced assignments: batch? Terminal, sure, send me the design documents, I'll test that. SOAP: never seen it before, but not really worried, send the documents and give me a demo, I can do that, I"ll write everyone a tutorial afterward.

The most important thing Linux does is it teaches you--and keeps doing it--that your computer is not an unknowable force of nature you have no ability to control or anticipate, but a tool. A complicated, advanced tool, but a tool. It shows you and tells you how each part of the tool works and why and how they fit together and you have no reason to be afraid or panic ever again. Nothing will faze you anymore: hard drive error to cataclysmic failure, motherboard short to weird beeping that never stops: okay, you have experienced it (twice) or you read about that on that site when you were looking up sed statements, you can handle this. You may have checklists for it. You recompiled kernels, which at one point you were sure were some sci-fi thing; this is not even on the radar for upsetting.

You will have the extreme pleasure of telling Windows when it gets saucy with you 'You do know I can format you down to bare drive and reinstall everything in the next five seconds? My data is safely backed up on Watson Xubuntu and I have some free time; are you really feeling it right now?" And do it. And be annoyed for the next few hours you have to do it, but you can and if you have to, will, and it's inconvenient but you're not worried at all because this is not some unknowable wtf black box magic; Linux taught you this is just a tool, and exactly how it works and everything will be fine.

This has been my SepTalk on me and my feelings about Linux.

For aesthetics: Budgie, with Cinnamon a close second For simplicity and speed: XFCE