Update:
I want to thank everyone who weighed in in the comments. Based on your feedback, I’ve decided to hunt for good deals by searching for usff, mini pc, and/or thin client on used marketplaces. Looks like I should be able to nab something very serviceable for my purposes for around $50 no problem. Again, this is not for a production environment, just something I can throw on the corner of my desk and kinda forget that it’s there except when I want to follow some random tutorial on the internet.
For those who suggested I use VMs for this, I hear ya. However, I’d like to get as close as possible to the real deal (bare metal if you will) so that I don’t have to futz around w/ passing through graphics or networking or anything like that. Tbh configuring VMs properly is almost more difficult for me than just working on a spare bare metal unit.
Thanks again!
Original post:
In my self hosting journey, which is very much in its infancy mind you, many times I’ve longed for an extra machine I can use to try following tutorials on setting up samba shares, home assistant, what have you without having to worry about messing up my main machine and having to clean up after myself. As for acquiring such hardware on the cheap, I keep reading how the laptopocalypse w/ Windows 10 end of life will flood the markets w/ literally unlimited free e-waste bro!!! But my own experience hunting these EOL once in a lifetime deals has been more frownie face than happy face. Lots of $100+ listings and, idk that just seems like a lot to ask for something like that.
So just for fun I searched eBay for “raspberry pi” and came across this listing for a raspberry pi 3 w/ 1 GB RAM for $25. 1 GB of RAM seems like not very much, but then again I’m not trying to break the sound barrier here, I just want something that can sit on my desk basically unnoticed and hook it up to my KVM switch so I can switch to it from time to time, like whenever I want to try following a tutorial and not losing any sleep if I fail (and I fail often).
I’ve also kinda always had a little bit of envy from not being in the raspberry pi club, so this is my shot at getting into the club. I think I’m going to spring for this one, so my question for the audience is, but like honestly am I about to piss $25 down the drain? Would this be good enough for my purposes or is the 1 GB of RAM going to bottleneck me like a boss?
Sorry for the run on sentences, my brain’s tired today.
1GB is probably enough to run one basic service without a GUI. If you want anything more than that you’re going to probably end up running out of RAM and hitting the SWAP file–grinding everything to a snail’s pace. Useful projects here might be to add smarts to something dumb around the house or making an old printer support wireless printing via cups.
Like others have said if you want to tinker, a virtual machine via virtualbox or VMware is free for your use case.
If you strongly prefer hardware, an old PC will probably be cheap or free.
If you really want a pi you’ll probably have to look for something that has at minimum 4Gb (which will be easy to outgrow), recommending 8GB+. Note that raspberry pi’s run best on the official power plug as a USB-a to micro/c won’t provide enough power to be stable and will cause weird issues or crash the pi under heavier loads or when drawing power from the pins.