Raspberry Pi alternatives?

DentFuse

Disciple
Hello all,

I know this question has probably been beaten to death but I wanted to get everyone's opinion on which one would the best for my use case and if there were difference between them.

I basically needed a Raspberry Pi for running a personal VPN server and for a couple of personal project. Basic requirements are 1gb RAM. I looked on the official Raspberry Pi website but a were outta stock. Which alternative would be good for my use case?
 
From what I've seen most alternatives like the Orange Pi have seen price increases/stock depletion as well, so the only real options I can think of are the x86 ones like the LattePanda, ASUS Tinker Board and Nvidia Jetson, all of which have much higher price tags. Honestly, if space and power aren't a concern for you, you're probably better off buying one of those second hand office computers with really old CPUs in them - as long as you don't need a large core/thread count or hardware decode/encode, they'll probably do what you need them to.
 
That's probably do good for the vpn server how ever I needed a portable device for my project since it's related to IOT and needs to be in a compact form factor. Hence my original choice was a pi.
 
Amazon has pi3 b+ model at around 9.6k
Plus there's this
Friendly ELEC NanoPi R1 SBC Dual Network Port IoT Router with 1GB RAM & 8G EMMC Supporting Open Source Ubuntu and OpenWrt https://amzn.eu/d/dHA2qpf
Unfortunately those are really unreasonable prices and risky as they are not even official sellers. Better to wait for official resellers to re-stock them. I wish they would add India to rpilocator.
 
If you're willing to spend around 5k, you could get an old Android phone with a SD820 class processor, flash custom firmware, and use that - provided you can make it work, that should be enough horsepower for most single user projects.
 
If you're willing to spend around 5k, you could get an old Android phone with a SD820 class processor, flash custom firmware, and use that - provided you can make it work, that should be enough horsepower for most single user projects.
I second this.

Use an old android phone, root it and run Linux using an app "Linux Deploy".

...unless you need GPIO.
 
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