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.

Oh... that's a huge question. It's been a long time now. I have used these in various projects for a lot of engineering, research, home networks, and embedded projects. I almost always run them headless over a serial console then SSH in for management.

• RPi 1 - my son used it recently for the RCA TV out
• RPi 2B
• RPi 3A+
• RPi 3B+
• RPi Zero
• RPi Zero W
• RPi 4B+
• Beagle Bone Black - I ran a pair of these as TOR relays for years. They were tanks.
• NanoPi NEO-LTS
• NanoPi NEO Air-LTS - The current one in service is an OctoPi server for my 3D printer
• Orange Pi 5 (I got one of the 32GB ones! - currently a Plex server with an external SSD and onboard M.2)
• Orange Pi Zero2
• C.H.I.P. Computer - this BTW was one of the best little hacking computers. It was phenomenal to setup and run over the OTG USB console
• Bannana Pi (original) - It was great because it had a SATA port so we used them to back network Linux installs for smart home kits.

I do a ton of other work with embedded microcontrollers too. Lots of ATMega and SAMD boards, plus a bunch of ESP 8266/32 variants.

For SBC, you can’t beat Raspberry Pi. The ecosystem is just there and the support outclasses every other board.

For hardware based on SBCs, Pine64 hands down. Devices like the Pinebook and Pinetab are SBCs in a hardware shell and as such should feel like cheap gadgets, but their build quality is excellent and these feel like premium devices. I have just started messing with the Pinetab 2 and it feels like a device 3x its price, to the degree that I don’t mind that the drivers and software for it are still a work in progress.

Beagleboards are great. Good Support and nice community. Nearly as good as Pi. I used BBB because it was the only open hardware SBC available in my area.

BTW: Please recommend me other good Open Hardware/Open Firmware SBCs. I am always looking for something new. Maybe for a Router or Selfmade-NAS.

pine64 ..never lets me down

I have 2 Odroid C4 SBC's that I use as desktop replacements and an Odroid C1 that is my pi hole and Quake 2 server.

All very capable for their intended purpose. Very happy with them. I chose them because they were more powerful than contemporary rpi devices.

I like Pine64 because they running any operating system that runs on ARM and has an open bootloader. The Pi has a proprietary booloader so they don't work as well for BSD.

I have my trusty raspberry pi 3b+, 4 years old now and been on 24/7 as a bit torrent box for 3 of those years. Never had it crash once other than deludge gtk having more leaks than a sieve.

I started with an RPi 1b to read out my weatherstation (WH1080 clone) and post it online with weewx. Then a Bananapi R1 entered to replace my intel system as firewall/core router (savings on power usage, a lot). The RP 1 got replaced by a RPi 2, and tne 1 moved to the smartmeeter for readout. The main server (huge AMD tower) got replaced by a RPi 3 (again, power savings), Bpi R2 replaced the R1 when bananian development stopped. RPi 3 died on me (sd slot failed) and I got a replacement. As the 1st RPi3 was dead anyway, I tried to repair it (only use of the solderings at the side proved to be to keep the slot in place) and used it to replace the Bpi R2 as support got problematic.

The main server got upgraded to a RPi 4 8GB, with the RPi3 replacing the RPi2 that was handeling my weatherstation. I got an rflink, so I added domoticz and that now powers my kaku (dutch power switching system) in a mixed old/new setup. The RPi3 that was my main router (internet router via fiber) got replaced hh an RPi4 witn 4 GB mem, as the 2 GB mem version wasn't available. (Not a bad move, with the on-board non-usb 1GB interface and a tad over 2 GB mem use)

The freed RPi3 is now for the smartmeter, so all RPi are 64 bit. (All running aarm64 Debian) Both Bpi's and RPi 1 and 2 are collecting dust, as I haven't found a use for them... yet. Looking for projects to use them. As media server they're to light. (Although, Bpi R2 could be useful for that)

Have an old Pi3b that works as a little 1080p Plex server. Wish I could get a four but I'll probably get a mini PC when I decide to upgrade.

My original Raspberry Pi model B I bought on release day, fighting the latency and downtime of the websites selling them. Never did much with it but was my introduction to SBCs.

What I actually use day to day are a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ which is attached to a 3d printer running Octoprint and a Pi 4 running as a small home server to host my NextCloud and IRC bouncer (amongst a couple of other things).

My favourite toy at the moment is actually my StarFive VisionFive 2 RISCV board, its been fun trying it out and getting applications to compile on it which don't officially support RISC-V.

I get the appeal of the single board computer but it never held much interest for me. That could possibly be because my manual dexterity isn't that good and I found the assembly side of the SBC to be daunting. I've been more interested in using the tiny form factor Dell Wyse and Lenovo micro machines.

I haven't gotten one yet, but Orange pi 5 plus.

Why

"Can't use if I can't maintain" -- low power usage > performance, pretty much. And I'm 100% down on ditching my desktop PC for a couple of those little guys.

I installed Arch on all my PIs just so I can reinstall every single one because they have abandoned new packages. But it also was unofficial. Now I just generally want to move to Star64 because Risc-V sounds interesting.

I've been using a Zima Board for my home network. I have the mid-range, 4Gb memory, 32GB onboard. It's got two SATA ports, dual gigabit Ethernet, an Intel processor and PCI express port that I'm eventually going to use to run an old wifi card so i can isolate my IOT devices on a dedicated wifi network.

The only problem i have with it is RAM and transcoding. I have 22 containers running things from the "arr" suite (Prowlarr, Radarr, Readarr, ect), pihole, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, etc. I stay around 80% memory usage, so i should have gotten the 8GB. And forget about trying to transcode Blu-ray rips, which most of my devices can't stream natively, so transcode is the only option. The audio stutters and playback pauses every ten seconds or so. I don't have a problem streaming the file through samba, it just doesn't have the "omph" that it needs for hardware transcoding of Blu-ray.

All that being said, i would get another one over the Raspi. Case/heatsink built in, SATA, PCI-E, dual gigabit, everything i need for a basic server.

I have a raspberry pi 3 running pihole. Been trying to get my hands on a pi4 but it’s been difficult.

At work we develop instrumentation used in outdoor surveys, and I am writing a new version of the software which downloads the data logger and so forth. This is done by connecting a little USB dongle to the instrument.

Lately, I've been thinking about the possibility of adding an SBC to the dongle itself. My new generation of the software has a low-level component written in C++ which handles the USB I/O and a GUI component written in Python. So the idea is the C++ tool would run on the SBC and the Python would be a client that could run on any machine with LAN access to it.

So I am wondering at this point what would be a good candidate for the SBC? It would not need to be particularly high performance I think? Low power requirements would be good. And it should support wifi and ethernet and be rugged enough for outdoor use. (It would be protected by the metal enclosure of the dongle but may still be subject to temperature swings and some rough handling.)

I've had an Odroid running for many years, just as a Linux server to play with and automate some stuff on my home LAN. I was looking to upgrade to something with more RAM and found that the SBCs with more RAM get expensive pretty quick. Plus, there is the limitation of depending on a custom Linux build from the manufacturer that runs on the device. So I ended up buying a mini PC for not much more than an SBC with lots of RAM. There's this one, as an example for $150

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYD8SFBW

I ended going higher in price with this one

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B74GGMBG

But for just playing with Linux, these are much more useful because you can run any normal Linux distro.

I had a sheevaplug or something like that (I can't remember the exact name, but it was around 2010). That thing was hot and it actually stopped too much times. Then the raspberry pi 1 (the original). Too slow. I've upgraded to a Raspberry Pi 3, that I used a couple of times as a desktop when my laptop broke. That wasn't fun, it was slow too. During COVID I sold that and bought a Pi 4 from an authorized seller, so it was the official price. I bought an SSD and an Argon One case. The fan broke after a few month of usage, so I sold the whole thing. Finally I went to eBay and bought a Dell Optiplex Micro. That thing is the best. Used as a desktop, also as a server. It's fast, smallish (not that small as a RPi, but it's close. It can go to a backpack), and upgradable. It can have two monitors, two ram sticks, an SSD Nvme and also an SSD SATA. It's a little beast.