I'm ve been on the hunt for an alternative as well, but because I need a bit more RAM and CPU since it's for a media center a lot of the alternatives are not good enough. The OrangePi seems like it could be one, but both it and the Raspberry are so expensive currently that I don't think either is worth at the moment, I'll just keep running out of my laptop for the time being.

I finally got around to using an old PINE64 SBC and that’s worked well for me. Have thought about getting an Orange Pi5 with the RK3588. I’ve seen them on Amazon and AliExpress and I’ve been mostly eyeballing 16GB variants but they’ve come in around $70 to $150ish depending on the amount of RAM (4-16GB). There’s a 32GB variant but that’s overkill for most of my use cases.

Hi SirPyschoMantis,

I'm certainly no expert but just recently started a similar project you are describing. I went with a used HP ProDesk 400 G2 mini. It has a i5-6500t, 8GB and 250GB ssd.

I run Ubuntu server on it with docker. It's compact and capable of running a bit more then a Raspberry Pi I believe.

When searching for a Pi alternative I also came across a similar mini pc from Dell. Thats was a Dell OptiPlex 3040 SFF.

I'm from the Netherlands and used prices here were around 100-150 €.