Why I love my PIs

[Gavinmc42]

Protz and Wheeler .... it's all you need .

Amazon for books? Why didn't I think of that?
Time to make a list?

Wonder how long to learn to make every beer in that book?
Could be a useful skill come the apocalypse, no warlord would waste a beer maker?
The TMP117 is accurate to +/-0.1C

loaned a 3B+ to the local public library's unofficial IT guy

Probably lots of public PC's could be replaced with Pi's.
Boot from network with just one master Pi?
Wonder how much power that would save gov agencies?
And they are not quite good enough to play Fortnite
Which means my kid won't get kicked out of the library for hacking a PC's and playing it

[Burngate]

IT guys tend to be quite conservative - they know a Windows tower works, they know the users know how to use it, and when things go wrong they know how to fix it quickly, even if that means spending money on a new tower.

The Pi is priced low, so that when things go wrong it's not too costly to replace. £200 on a new laptop means you aren't going to experiment too much, whereas $35 doesn't break the bank.
And, because an SD card can be replaced even more cheaply, experimentation is even less daunting - screw up your Windows laptop, and most people will curl up in a corner.

[tpyo kingg]

IT guys tend to be quite conservative - they know a Windows tower works, they know the users know how to use it, and when things go wrong they know how to fix it quickly, even if that means spending money on a new tower.

I disagree strongly with the middle three of those five assertions, but perhaps that is for another thread. As to the power savings of the RPi versus your average tower, when I measured power consumption on a small sample of older towers, I found that they idle using at least 30W which is significantly more than the RPi 3B+. So the relatively low power requirement is an asset.

[PhatFil]

IT guys tend to be quite conservative - they know a Windows tower works, they know the users know how to use it, and when things go wrong they know how to fix it quickly, even if that means spending money on a new tower.

Shirley you mean
Guys, (and Gals) with budgets and who know less about IT than their subordinates tend to be quite conservative - they know a Windows tower works, they know the users know how to use it, and when things go wrong they know how to fix it quickly, even if that means spending money on a new tower.

[hippy]

Probably lots of public PC's could be replaced with Pi's.
Boot from network with just one master Pi?
Wonder how much power that would save gov agencies?

They could probably save a fair bit of power. The problem with government agencies is that a lot of the software used is proprietary and specialised, only runs on X86. A lot of it is probably written in such a way it won't work well, if at all, on a constrained Pi.

And those agencies often need systems which can be locked down, only allow authorised access via swipe cards and access keys, while supporting hot-desking, roaming profiles and the like.

There's far more to it than just swapping the hardware.

[Gavinmc42]

They could probably save a fair bit of power. The problem with government agencies is that a lot of the software used is proprietary and specialised, only runs on X86. A lot of it is probably written in such a way it won't work well, if at all, on a constrained Pi.

proprietary ? Yep sure is, it's called Windows.

Takes a brave gov agency to go Linux, mostly becuase IT people are now MS trained and only old ones do Linux(Unix for the really old ones who just retired).

Hopefully the next gen are trained on Pi's
Hot desks will be Pi based and just yank your USB based OS to move to another?

In the early Pi years here IT asked me what antivirus I had on my new Pi before they allowed me to connect.
A few now have their own Pi's;)

[hippy]

proprietary ? Yep sure is, it's called Windows.

It is. Windows is the chosen platform and software providers are contracted to deliver solutions which work for Windows. Then it becomes a Catch-22; there is no solution for anything but Windows and nothing but Windows gets used because there isn't the software for anything else.

Takes a brave gov agency to go Linux, mostly becuase IT people are now MS trained and only old ones do Linux(Unix for the really old ones who just retired).

I am not convinced that's true at all. It's at the desktop where Linux hasn't made its mark, not in the datacentres and IT departments.

Hot desks will be Pi based and just yank your USB based OS to move to another?

Which is the polar opposite of what government agencies, probably any IT provider, would want. That will be seen as a negative rather than a positive for most corporate IT departments.

[Heater]

Gavinmc42,

Hot desks will be Pi based and just yank your USB based OS to move to another?

Sounds like most It organisation's worst security nightmare!

[FeliciaH]

Small
Retro gaming
Nextcloud - giving access to my files from anywhere
Plex, giving access to my media anywhere
PiHole, for ad blocking
VPN, for security
tvheadend - for live TV anywhere (via Kodi)

I could go on. Why do you love your PI(s)?

Exactly, Im happy the most with PiHole, VPN and Nexcloud awesome services. Still discovering more.