Raspberry Pi 4

I use TP link Omada gear and its a been very good replacement to unifi. I use it both personally & manage a side gig venue’s network. I have lots of vlans & even run dante & ndi with no issues. Replaced a Unifi system it was so buggy. DHCP reserve IPs failed, spotty issues with artists phones & the mixer board to mix their in-ears etc. I’ve setup IPSec tunnel to AWS VPC even pretty easy. Using a pi4 for last 4 years on poe running their management docker container. So solid! I’d recommend the pi over buying their hardware device mamager, its way slower.

Requirements do vary. And I've got no regrets about using a Pi 4 a router. It's sitting on the shelf next to me, and has been trouble-free for over four years now.

Been running nextcloud on a raspberry pi 4 on prem for a very small business <5 users for about 3-4 years ish. It’s faster than most clouds because it’s local. I’ve had very little trouble with it. Don’t tend to use much the features apart from files sync though.

Thermal underwear. Entering the 10th year of a 30 euro Helly Hansen long underpants that keeps me warm half the year. Raspberry Pi 4 that served as my daily driver for around three years. A couple of dumbbells that got me started with weight training, and kept me going during covid. Together with the basic equipment that I later bought, it saved me hundreds and hundreds of euros in gym memberships. Best purchase under 10 euros is a simple cube with blank memo notes, that I use for grocery shopping and all kinds of other to do lists.

I ran Ubuntu Mate on a Raspberry Pi 4 for over three years as my daily driver. Mostly programming, browsing (also Youtube) and image editing. I even did some light video editing on it. I ended up with Mate eventually, other options except Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS didn't work fast enough. P.S. Literally every desktop environment on Linux looks better than Windows, if you'd ask me.

Been running HA and a couple other services on RPi 4 with old SSD and DietPi as the OS, behind tailscale for 2 years. It needs a restart maybe once in a blue moon, and it's back online in 1 min, that's it.

I've been using a raspberry pi 4 for 2 years with no issues. You need a good, clean power source or you can have all kinds of issues. Having good ventilation won't hurt. You also need a good sdcard that can handle a large volume of writes.

a) Cable ethernet b) SSD (via USB3.0 adapter on my RPI4) c) Ubuntu Server LTS 22.04. d) cheap UPS. Mine runs Yggdrasil network, HAproxy, Caddy server, a couple of webservers in containers, and a TMUX instance that I log into almost daily to write code (slow computer reveals bad code much better). Since I put it (and my router) on the UPS, in the last 2 years it has literally never gone offline other than a couple of times I rebooted it for firmware upgrades.

I use RPi 4 with a cheap SSD connected via USB-to-SATA connector as a tiny home server for a year already and it works without issues. I know that not all USB-to-SATA connectors are compatible with RPi – I got lucky with the first connector I tried (Unitek). Not sure if RPi 5 has a wider compatibility.

Sample size of 1, but I ran an RPi4 just fine on a USB thumb drive for about a year. Still upgraded to an SSD later because I wanted even more storage space (and SSD seemed to have better random IOPS than a thumb-drive), but I'd say go for it.

Do people really have such a neurotic aversion to the sight of cables that they'd rather struggle with workarounds to an always-inferior wifi than just using an ethernet cable? It seems unhealthy to get that stressed out over the sight of a 3cm wide cable. I've had an RPi4 running continually for close to a year and never had a single network connectivity issue between the RPi4 and my router, connected via a 30m cat5 cable in my 75m² condo.

I used to use DD-WRT, and Tomato, and Shibby's mod of Tomato, and Advanced Tomato, and other stuff. Somewhere, I'm sure I still have a WRT54GS that I hacked ~20 years ago to accept SD cards. It was a fun time in using inexpensive hardware in unintended ways. At one point, and I don't remember exactly when, I just started using OpenWRT instead. It wasn't always the case, but it presents a very usable GUI straight away these days and it has a ton of flexibility for getting creative later. At home I run it on a Pi4 that I bought for the purpose. It keeps up with my 500/20Mbps DOCSIS internet very well indeed. I've used it with a USB NIC to get dedicated ports, and also with VLANs and a managed switch instead. I just download and flash the card, plug stuff in, and configure it. No real issues -- for years, now. (Wireless is provided by Mikrotik access points.) When something faster happens in my neighborhood (which may be very soon; I had a very brief chat with a dude whose fiber splicing trailer was parked across the street just yesterday), I'll probably want to move to something more capable. That could be in the form of faster Pi, or an old PC running OPNsense -- or even stick with OpenWRT. No big deal. If I really wanted a tidier package for light-weight travel or something, then I guess I'd pick something appropriate from glinet and put an official OpenWRT image on it. For heavier-travel, I've got a kit with a Pi4, a managed PoE switch, and a backup Mikrotik box (th…

I used to get Sandisk cards but recently I stopped using SD cards altogether. When it came time to update from Debian 12 to 13 for my Pi4 I migrated to an NVME USB enclosure for my boot drive. Just yesterday I set up another Pi4 for a project with an M.2 SATA enclosure and in both cases they work just fine.

You can, I am self-hosting Immich via Docker on Raspberry Pi 4 with small SSD and it's nothing but good experience so far (but I keep the photos backed up elsewhere just in case, I use Immich mostly to share curated sets of photos)

Maybe so. The documentation seems to be all over the map, and the GUI suggests using "attended sysupgrade" for upgrades. ...which I tried doing, a week or so ago, for a minor point release update within the 25.12.x series. And then the router went out to lunch and didn't come back. Getting it going again wasn't so bad as such things go. My router has a huge advantage here in that it's a Raspberry Pi 4, so it's easy to remove/replace/re-do the flash device and start over. (Except: I get all out of sorts when I need to do Internet stuff to fix my Internet connection while that Internet connection is absent.)

I use LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi 4, though it doubtless also works well on a Pi 5 (and the cheapest one with 1 GB of RAM is probably plenty). It does great with local [networked] media and that's all I use it for. There's a million plugins for other things, some dating back to the XBMC days on the OG Xbox 20+ years ago, that others may find utility in... but for regular commercialized streaming I just use a $25 Chromecast and that does the business well-enough. (LibreElec has a huge advantage to me that most people probably don't care about: My AV receiver sounds brilliant and was once very expensive [~$4,500], but it's rather old and it chokes on HDMI signals higher than 1080i. It is also unable to decode things like Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, and DTS-HD. This would make the receiver a non-starter for post-Blu-Ray film soundtracks, except the Pi4 has two HDMI outputs. It is a no-effort built-in for LibreElec to use one of these outputs for video, while the other one is dedicated to high-res multichannel PCM audio. In this way: The video system gets whatever video signals it wants, while the audio system is just fed PCM audio and doesn't have to struggle with any of that more-modern business at all. Everything is very happy with this arrangement.)