I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it's just a much nicer experience.

The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC "just works," and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).

My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.

Yes. The Lemmy instance I’m commenting from is running on a Raspberry Pi 4. A couple things you’ll need to consider though:

• Any containers / applications you run need to be compiled for arm64. This is way more common now than it used to be, but there are still some things that only work on x86 (like many game servers)
• You should hook up external storage to your Pi. You can boot from an SSD via USB 3 and you’ll get way better performance, capacity, and write endurance than an SD card.
• RAM will likely be your first limitation. Many services can run well under 4GB, but once you start adding more, it can fill up if you’re not careful.
• You probably already knew this, but even though the Pi has WiFi, plug it into the network via Ethernet. As a rule, you should never run servers off WiFi if you can avoid it. You’ll get much better speeds and reliability.