These machines have so much potential.

In a better world we'd all have one in our homes, storing all our personal data and documents. The cloud would only be used for storing encrypted backups.

Many small businesses, kindergartens etc. could also have all their digital needs served this way.

Yes they would sometimes break down, but with the right setup, the fix would be a matter of booting a replacement from the right thumbdrive.

After pi’s got expensive I started picking up refurbished Dell micros and Lenovo tinys cheap and haven’t looked back. They are also perfect for the 10” mini rack[0].

0: https://github.com/geerlingguy/mini-rack#build-showcase

A few years back I finally got tired of the quirks with ArchlinuxARM (some things only worked with the forked kernel, some only worked with mainline) and replaced all my persistent RPi usage with refurbished Lenovo mini PCs from Amazon. Even with Amazon’s markup it wasn’t that much more than a beefy Pi4 plus case and adapters.

This let me standardize on amd64 and simplified a bunch of my deploy code.

I also have one and use it as a home server. They’re insanely capable (I’m constantly running a lot of resource heavy things on it), and it cost a lot less than a pi even though the specs of mine are way better

How is power consumption? I think often desktops have higher power supplies inside, fans etc, while an old laptop will only use a few W when idle.

Dont forget Dell OptiPlex Micro & HP ProDesk as well for similar tiny corporate used bargains.

Also Intel NUCs (now ASUS NUCs). I once saw a lot of 50 units for sale on Craigslist for a ridiculous low price.

thinkcentre 9xx is like the best bang for the buck right now

I like the SFF PCs but I'd really like one with a USB C connector for the power. The power bricks take up a bunch of space and are not fungible.

I bought an HP thin-client PC for a few bucks that was basically just an HP Stream system board without battery, keyboard, or display. Delightfully, frustratingly rinky-dink but it seems to run Linux and OpenBSD well.