good alternatives to raspberry pi which are cheap and efficient?

KDE@monyet.cc to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 156 points –

Hello , dear lemmy users , I am starting to really like self-host because they are really fast and mostly i use open source stuff (like lemmy /photon etc) which were sometimes slow but after self hosting it now on the pc i am on using , i really like it

Now , I would like to host some stuff like jellyfin , navindrome , photon , adgaurd home and just leave it running on a device in maybe near future (i can convince my brother to pay for it , after he gets his job maybe)

TLDR : I wanted to ask What's your favourite alternative to raspberry pi for simple self hosting or maybe possible near home automation

Edit: thank you all for helping me , I am starting to believe that i should look into using dell wyse or the likes which are meant to be used for hosting or a old laptop (since i dont own a laptop anyway , i just own a pc ) and since i run linux anyways , i am thinking of owning a laptop dual booting it with alpine (that has docker) and a simple minimalist os like hyprland on it just in case i need to travel with it (which to me seems very unlikely , I dont travel much so..) I am confused about it

Edit 2 : I am very new to self hosting so currently i would run stuff on my pc only (using portainer) , However when needed to buy , i am thinking of buying the cheapest thin client maybe a nuc or dell wyse

I am already trying searxng , shiori(bookmark manager) , portainer,freshrss , photon , froodle-s pdf tool which i have all closed except portainer currently I am also thinking of shifting to podman as well but cant find a good gui for it like portainer , (portainer really just blew my mind with its templates)

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I'm a big fan of dell wyse machines. Loads on ebay, ex business machines. X86 so decent support, decent dell power supply, on / off button / in cases and low power.

I have wyse 3040 for pihole cost 39.99

I have wyse 5070 with windows 10 for plex and running a Ubuntu 22 server in virtual box, cost 59.99

Thanks for the suggestion (I am looking forward to other comments as well) Well , I like x86 in general but not for self-hosting maybe? i have heard that they are bulky and take a lot of energy

You can expect a thin client to use about 10 watts idle (but more under load), which adds up to about 100 kWh per year. Some models use even less.

Source,

When people say x86 is not power efficient, it usually means it's not very efficient for battery powered devices, or is kind of wasteful in situations like in data centers where they're running thousands of machines. For home use, with a machine that's gonna probably end up idling most of the time, my best guess is it would cost you a couple tens of dollars a year to run vs a slightly smaller amount.

Personally, just so I don't have to deal with software compatibility on different architectures, I'll gladly pay that small difference in power usage, but this will of course vary depending on what you're looking to run on there.