Must fight temptation to buy an overpriced raspberry pi

If you only need a basic server, laptops are AMAZING.

Full x86 software support
On the rare occurrence you need to directly interface with it (as opposed to through a webgui on another machine) you have a built-in keyboard and monitor.
They have a god-damned built-in UPS

Note that the battery will generally stop working after a long enough time turned on and powered via AC, but otherwise yeah.
- True. The best laptops are the ones that let you set a charge limit in the BIOS.
  For what it's worth, though, the exact same happens to UPSes
- That depends on the age and quality of the laptop. It's been a while since some started directly running off the cable when the battery is full.
- Well you have have battery profile settings so you could just set it to never charge above 75% and it will last a long time.
  Also UPSs need replaced like every 2 years and according to Jim Salter tend to catch fire if you don't?
- I have a decade old lenovo yoga that still lasts like 40 minutes unplugged. Idunno how much a UPS that can supply a desktop for that long would cost, nor if that's an embarrassingly short time, but it works well enough for me
- That will happen to an actual UPS as well.
- Would pulling out the battery (if possible) and running the laptop only via AC be a viable way to prevent unnecessary battery wear?
  I remember back when I didn't have a desktop PC yet I had a crusty old ASUS laptop that was basically at death's door and I specifically remember just running it on AC alone because the battery was.. uh.. gone
The network cards tend to be hit and miss

The magic words for ebay:

off lease thin client lot

love you!
oh wow, I really wish I had known that last time I was looking for mini PCs for my cluster, I'm saving that now. Thank you!
What does this combination of words mean?
- "off lease" means they were leased out to corporations and have been returned and are now being sold.
  "thin client" is a thin client. familiarity is assumed on linux@programming.dev
  "lot" means the seller is selling more than one of 'em.
🙇‍♂️

‼️

I once did some research & measurements about power consumption; my takeaway was that as soon as the screen is off any ol' laptop (with the charger constantly attached) consumes pretty much the same amount of energy as a RasPi with identical storage attached.

I used a 2008 hp consumer laptop as a server between 2015 and 2021.

Not my experience. I've used a bunch of stuff, and I can tell you a RasPi is what, 10W under load and 4 idling? A repurposed laptop (with a dedicated GPU but screen off) was 11W idling and 45W under load, and a repurposed desktop was about 40W idling and 120W under load.
You maaaay be able to find some laptop with an efficient CPU and iGPU that gets into the realm of a RasPi, and I guess the "identical storage" qualifier helps if you're adding a bunch of heavy storage to the Pi to bring total consumption up and lower the percentage gap, but my real world, real time measurements don't quite match that.
That said, if you already have one of those things and not the other the power consumption difference is fairly small in absolute numbers. You may save more money by buying a slighlty better lightbulb for your living room lamp. Definitely recycle whatever you have lying around that will still do the job.
- That is high for a laptop. I have a PC, its fanless which helps, but it runs maybe 15w idle with display shut down, and 23w if graphics display is active. 45 watts if I'm rendering video. Your 120w might be the battery charging at max maybe?
- Your pi is idling at 4w? That seems quite high. Does it have a nvme drive attached or something?
My napkin math is similar, although I do wonder about transcoding machines where the old one is using CPU vs newer solutions in the GPU.
- Well Rpi is out of the question right away then right?
Used an old eee701 as a server for a fair while, pretty sure that was equal or less power usage than the Pis at the time.

In my experience rPi was terrible as a local server. The micro SD cards would fail regularly and I just got tired of handling backups and restoring them. I switched to a set up box type tiny PC and it's stable as rock in comparison. Old laptop would be even better for that, shame I didn't think about it.

Not all SD cards are created the same, but also make sure you add "temp to RAM" setup so the constant tmp writes are not burning out the card.
Net boot ftw, no sd card necessary.

if you live in a country where used things are affordably priced

Or live in a country with laptop-filled landfills or free old laptops roaming the streets.
- That's a rare USA W btw
  Their second-hand stuff culture is exceptional

It's too much power draw for me.

This. Even a cheap alibaba n100 would be way better on Power than pretty much any laptop.
- Quick computation for Seattle, powering a typical laptop consuming 20W to run say an IoT server, 24/7 at 14 cents/kwh would cost about $25/year. A Pi 4 would be about 1/10th of that.

But I don't want a laptop. I want the gimmick computer for random as fuck niche hobby tinkering. Like making an automated Nerf turret.

You can control nerf turrets as-is. My dev manager wrote a script to read the build mail and make his nerf turret shoot a volley of darts into the cubicle of whoever broke the build. And that was 15 years ago.
- Ok that's genius

Lenovo thinkcentre tiny gang rise up!

I even use it as my daily driver (bumped RAM & storage), running Lemmy & Tenfingers plus all the usual jazz.

I will have to replace my old NAS one day because it's super old, I'll probably just chuck some drives into a think centre tower or something... I wonder how long time it will take before the electricity consumption would have made it cheaper to buy one of those increasingly expensive NASes...

Tenfingers needs to work on their SEO; I searched for exactly that and most of the first few results were 10fastfingers, which is exactly what came to my mind when I read your post! Even the first one that seemed to be what you're referencing was about how to install it, rather than what I was trying to find: what it is.
Sounds like a nifty tool, I'll have to investigate it. Thanks for introducing me to it.
For anyone who, like me, was unfamiliar but curious: https://www.tenfingers.org/introduction.html
- Thank you, yes I (I'm the creator) have ironed out the last large potential known problem (a specific type of mitm attack) and have been a bit overwhelmed by ordinary life lately. I'm working on what you might hint at, a less technical introduction to tenfingers. Basically it works like a decentralised online file system where you give the reading rights (to anyone or a select few) how you see fit. FOSS, encrypted & so on, more info in the above link :-)
  BTW don't hesitate to hit me up if there are any questions!
  Cheers

True dat! If you're around Seattle check out RePC.

I did try, but it was so shit that Linux refused to boot on it.

I'm more inclined to get one of the mini PCs but need a way to get a full size HDD or two in it for Jellyfin.

NVME / M.2 to 6x SATA boards, cheap enough on AliExpress.
I have an x16 PCIE bifurcated to 4 m.2 slots so a theoretical 24 SATA ports. Only one adaptor currently but lots of room to grow.

If it wasn't for Linux, these old computers would be useless. We need to remind them of that and not buy them for high prices. Beat them fucking prices down into a pulp. Your prices are too high you need to cut it. And not with baking soda but Common Sense. Don't be a thot... Get these prices to drop

Have you looked at the price of these old dusty ass laptops online? Like, they want a fortune for them. I'm just gonna wait until they're buried in Old Tech and then they eventually start selling them for cheap because I ain't buying that. Orange pis are way too expensive and raspberry pis are just irresponsible. Peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys. All this capitalist innovation, but yet we can't afford it. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

I have several options here : OrangePI, used Android TV box, mini PC, thin-client and laptop.

currently just installed dual boot Linux on my old mini PC (Celeron 1007U, 8GB RAM, 512GB HDD)

When I think of Raspberry Pi, I think of physical computing and not a server for the use case, which can't be replaced with a laptop.

This is something I've been thinking about this week actually. My old laptop has just died, power button just won't do anything, so I've been thinking about what to replace it with. Hoping I can maybe find a tossed out win 10 laptop with the end of life happening soon.

You can also rip apart such a laptop if you really want headless. Otherwise, a screen is pretty handy!

Funny thing is how to get the screen off if you are in a TTY. still not sure how!

Also, there are so many clones out there. I think now we're at maybe around four different brands you can choose from other than Raspberry Pi. And these prices are just inflated, absolutely inflated. Like price gouging. Like nonsense.