Hi everyone,
I’m currently changing my setup a bit and I’m thinking about firing up my Raspberry Pi 4 again as a home server kind thing. I typically use Arch (BTW) as my go-to linux distro but IIRC arch on the Pi gave me some trouble last time I tried it. Does anyone know how stable arch on Pi is right now? Also, is there a particular reason I should or shouldn’t use the native Raspberry Pi OS?
I know I didn’t write about uses really but that’s because I haven’t figured out what I want to do with it yet… I’ve recently moved my main server (mainly media) to my folks’ house since they got fiber (gotta go fast), but I think it makes sense having some lower profile server running in my own home so I can connect to it remotely.
RPi uses a lot of software hacks to get its low-cost hardware running. It is certainly doable on other distros, but using anything but the official ones on RPi is asking for trouble, and you better know how to deal with device trees, etc.
If you want SBC that is more standard-compliant and has better mainline driver support you should look at e.g. Pine64’s SBCs, such as RockPro64.
I reaaaaaaally want to avoid purchasing new hardware, I feel bad enough about buying my Pi before finding out it’s actually not that well suited for my needs at the time (media server.
I’d recommend going with the vanilla Raspberry Pi OS then. Sure, it’s not as lightweight as one would usually hope from a SBC OS, and it has the usual problems that apt has, but it general, it works. It has the firmware stuff ready, so no hassle with that. It has device trees set up in a generally-usable way from the get go, etc.
I didn’t go that route myself and spent couple of days trying to get hardware acceleration to work where I wanted with the VideoCore chip, after which I gave up. VideoCore just isn’t that well supported by the general software stacks, but this was a year or so ago, so it might’ve improved.
Also note that this is all RPi4 specific. Older RPis work quite well.