Like most people, I entered COVID as a normal hobby geek with a Linux server I played around with and a healthy hardware habit with a side of home automation and DD-WRT. I emerged from COVID enrolled in college, now with two servers (one new build, one rebuilt from my first one), two Pi, multiple instances of Home Assistant (one dedicated) and putting sensors on everything a sensor could go on and rewiring switches for wifi control of overhead fans, flashing every compatible router I could find on Amazon Warehouse with DDWRT in my home for an ad hoc mesh network (no, it didn't work, but I didn't care) while cabling everything to switches and creating a really hilarious network deathtrap tripping hazard, a massive media library (discovered Handbrake and making multiple resolutions) and a Sonos home theatre system. And yes, played an unhealthy amount of Animal Crossing and got an NVIDIA Shield Pro for streaming and Plex, as you do. I'm sure everyone can relate.
SBC's were the natural escalation; I had credit card bills to pay off and that's going to take a while.
I gatewayed with Pi like ten years ago but it took off during Later COVID when I noticed my credit score and started testing it as a NAS, Media Server (later: Cassiope Media Server, my second end to end Linux build), then got into learning about the kernel itself. I already had an Odroid (Home Assistant Blue) so why not go on, so project-based SBCs seemed healthy; I had a reason for buying one. This led to more Pi's--as I couldn't use Kernel Pi (Eurydice) for it and Andromeda Pi was masking my personal network, then I needed one for a Pihole (Iphigenia, Hecuba), which is how I ended up with a BeagleBone Black (Medusa) for an Open Thread Border Router. Still pretending I wasn't just collecting them like cats, I networked them together and just enjoyed looking at them and making them matching banners with figlet with the excuse I was learning how to do network-wide deployments over SSH (true) and learn Debian OS (technically, I am doing that) and started PoEing things (my credit card bills may not be getting lower, no).
The count stands at a total of 9: one (1) Pi Zero W, one (1) Pi Zero 2 W, one (1) Raspberry Pi 4B 4G, two (2) Raspberry PI 4B 8G, one (1) Odroid N2+, one (1) Beaglebone Black, one (1) PocketBeagle, and one (1) BeaglePlay. (Other: two Linux machines, Watson and Cassiope). Yes, they all have names and technically, each is associated with a project. The BeaglePlay's (Circe) associated project is 'create my own documentation on what it does because Beagles don't document'.
So which ones do you use, why, origin story, feelings: go.
(I'm moving in a week and half my hardware is being packed. I'm about to have to take down my network and Home Assistant and may be freaking out. I'm not sure I know where any light switches are here, either.)
When it comes to SBC, the choice has always been a Raspberry Pi. Why? A Raspberry Pi may not have the best performance. But in return you can be sure that it will still be supported after a kernel update. And that is exactly the problem with many alternatives. They support a certain, mostly old, kernel. And that's it. Furthermore, the community around the Raspberry Pi is simply huge.
Got a 3b a loong time ago and I love it, I use it as a jukebox and a tinker station.
Would love to get another one but man are they crazily expensive now. Tried the banana and orange pis and the are like okay but yep, they are different and doesn't seem to have the same community at all.
Chip shortage please go away!
Edit: I buy old dell optiplexes for like 40€ instead but they do take up quite the space...