[Wylug-discuss] Raspberry Pi

[Paul Brook]

> They are good, but I may have bought beaglebone for webserver if doing
> it again. If you have the money the udoo looks good, but at that price
> is it better to get a microserver?

"microserver" is a sufficiently generic term that it's hard to say. But there 
are definitely an increasing number of alternatives to a Pi. The beaglebone 
black, and cubieboard being the examples that spring to mind.  For a bit more 
money (say £100) then there are many much more capable alternatives, both Arm 
and x86 based.

Personally I think the Pi is a particularly poor piece of hardware.  The only 
technical benefit of the Pi is the hardware video decode (assuming you're 
willing to pay for the proprietary codec licence). The rest of the hardware is 
distinctly sub-standard.  I don't deny that it was one of the first linux 
capable boards in its price range, and arguably a staggering publicity 
success, but its age[1] and extreme cheapness really show.

If you're looking for a NAS/server system then I'd strongly recommend 
something with proper ethernet[2] and ideally SATA. It makes everything a 
whole lot simpler and more reliable.

Paul

[1] The arm core around which the Pi is built is substantially older than the 
Pi itself. So much so that most modern Linux distributions (and many Android 
vendors) consider it obsolete and not worth supporting.
[2] The Pi ethernet is implemented via an onboard USB-ethernet bridge.  This 
is a questionable solution to start with, and only gets worse when you 
consider that issues that the Pi USB implementation seems to have.