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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

> It’s a nice little affordable single-board computer with a huge community using it for all sorts of projects.

I always wished they would offer a less affordable, substantially more powerful (sufficiently to handle the YouTube and similarly heavy websites without so much pain, also having more PCIe/USB3 lanes perhaps) model. I wouldn't even mind if it was overpriced i.e. extra premium billed to subsidize the budget version or other charitable projects. Unfortunately 3-rd party clones are not a perfect solution because they don't have the said community and are not perfectly compatible. Or is there already a clone capable of running the original Raspberry PI OS?

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If you're looking for a more generally useful and powerful SBC, the space is taken by mini pcs ( Intel Nucs and their clones). AFAICT SBCs are a strange middle between microcontrollers (Arduinos, ESP32s, etc) and computers that seem to come out of the myriad of options from mobile chip sets; more generalizable than microcontrollers, not as extensible as a minipc.

Odroid seems to have the most powerful hardware in the SBC space currently, support varies by project.

> If you're looking for a more generally useful and powerful SBC

I just want the "modern web" to work Okay (YouTube and alike websites feel slowww, I mean not the actual video playback but the page itself) while keepig it being a Raspberry Pi in all the rest of the aspects (except the price - thanks G-d I can afford it cost more).

For example Raspberry Pi comes with community-standard GPIO also usable for extension "hats", uniform format (so a whole chassis market emerged for it), free Mathematica, well-supported Kodi and Lakka packages, numerous alternative distributions treating it as a first-class target.

By the way, the latter seemes especially intriguing to me. I imagined (before the supply chain apparently broke) Raspberry Pi becoming a standard hardware platform for all sorts of alternative OSes, potentially letting projects like like Haiku, ReactOS, Serenity etc out of the virtual boxes.

SBCs are becoming more popular because one of the prevailing patterns in designing complex embedded systems is to do the real-time control on a microcontroller running on bare metal or maybe an RTOS, and the GUI/database/web connectivity on an SBC running Linux. It's been happening for at least the last 20 years and becoming more popular because the hardware keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.

If your system cost can absorb it, this gives you a huge amount of flexibility and capability.

You might be interested in Project TinyMiniMicro series that ServeTheHome has covered: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

x86-based mini-PCs that are abundant on the used market, pack quite a punch, and generally use around 10-12W idling.

And with the current Raspberry Pi 4 pricing, they are actually a better deal.

Odriod H3+ might be for you. No big community as you say, but since it's x64, that probably matters less.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3-plus/

Isn't the 4 exactly that?

Not really, many websites still feel painfully slow. If I were a dictator I would force all front-end developers and UI/UX designers to use actual Raspberry Pi units as their main workstations so they would intuitively avoid making code/designs so heavy :-)

Yes please, Slack was unusable on my otherwise good 7-year-old laptop, because presumably all the Slack developers use new Macs.

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