Raspberry Pi alternatives for headless self hosted applications
Since rpis have been almost impossible to find, I've been looking around for alternatives for some local self hosted services like home assistant. A lot of boards seem to talk about GPU, GPIO pins, etc. But I really just want a single board, fanless (low power), decent CPU and RAM, ethernet.
This is what I use but with Debian. I had an older NUC 8 i5 lying around so I decided to drop 32GB of RAM and a new 1TB NVME drive into it. The performance is way better than a Pi and the measured power consumption at the wall socket is under 5 watts idle (peaks at around 13-15 watts under load if I recall correctly).
In terms of noise level, if I start loading the CPU heavily the fan can be noticeable .. however at idle or when it's just streaming Plex content to my TV (without transcoding), it doesn't make any fan noises at all.