>ARM chips manufacturers are providing bad software. Kernel is outdated, hardware acceleration is undocumented, etc. And when there is good software support, it is oriented towards smartphones and never lasts more than 3 years (hello Qualcomm).
It's why I'm sticking with X86 for my Linuxy projects. Migrating your entire SW stack from one ARM SBC to another is virtually impossible, while on X86 you never even think about it.
Not anymore. Intel sells Celeron quad-core chips with 5W-10W TDP with integrated graphics. AMD also.
R-Pi was leading 8 years ago when it was readily available, dirt cheap and x86 was only gas guzzlers. Now the market has shifted against it.
People should really look into recent developments instead of defaulting to R-Pi out of habit.
I can buy a Intel N5095 based NUC for 170 Euros on Amazon with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD[1]. Sure it's more expensive than a PI, but that thing is readily available, will sip power and blow any R-Pi out of the water performance wise, plus it comes with 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 3 display outputs. It can be a great home server, it can be a great PC replacement, it can be anything you want. R-Pi is still far to weak in comparison.
If that's too expensive and overkill for you, and you just want some low-end ARM SBC to blink some LEDs from the internet, there's still the Beagle Bone Black with a single core Cortex A8 and 512MB of RAM, for around 60-70 Euros.
They are loud-ish, especially compared to a Pi. They are a bit faster and run windows though (which was required by the vendor that I had no say in choosing).
That said, for my personal projects, I still kinda default to the Pi model. A bit more power efficient and there are some solid home projects built around the Pi.
I now have like 3-4 of them in the house, ranging from a Dakboard above the fridge, to a couple pi-kvm's, including one with a multiport attachment, to remotely manage some of my stuff at home so I dont have to lug monitors and keyboard about as much. Heck I strongly considered a pi-kvm for work, even if just used as a remote crashcart of sorts.
10 W is the the TDP, a fudged estimate of the maximum power, for x86 chip. Idle power is much, much lower and that's really the important part that the Raspberry Pi can't match because anecdotally it has minimal power management capabilities and therefore runs at full power (~4-5 W) whether idle or active. An x86 system can beat that.
It's why I'm sticking with X86 for my Linuxy projects. Migrating your entire SW stack from one ARM SBC to another is virtually impossible, while on X86 you never even think about it.