Well the internet is just 1 big visual image video and mostly advertising beast nowadays. 100+ organizations that do real-time ad-hoc ad-bidding, that is what many pages are.A sad day. I liked my 3B and 3B+, with full size HDMI ports, analog sound, and no vulns from speculative execution. While there's things I can do in TUI, like writing in wordgrinder and emailing in alpine, there's plenty that I can't do well. I may have to pass these SBCs on.
But for local LAN only can be different. Like playing own local H264 video for example. Or showing a local home automation page. Or maybe Node-RED canvas. I have some thumb-sized HDMI-VGA adaptors, those can be handy if an old VGA monitor should show something.
I tested 1 of my Pi3B with 64-bit Debian Testing pre-Bookworm playing some 640x40 or so. That worked really well, but as said in this topic, things should fit in that 1GB RAM, else forget it. 4x Cortex-A53 is still fine, there are actually new SBCs designed still with similar 4x Cortex-A55, although they have variants with 8GB RAM or so. But for some CLI based server, a Pi3B still can be fine.
Other OS won't matter that much, it all depends how and which HW is used. For RPi camera, latest RPiOS64 is great, no way you get that with something else. Same for display/HW acceleration. But those are not really generic traditional PC like applications. BSD or NetBSD or FreeBSD I see as good performing for non-GUI use-cases.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Tue Jun 10, 2025 10:11 am