No mini PC can beat most things about the Pi, apart from performance and compatibility, the latter of which is fully the fault of the manufacturer.

The Raspberry Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5 are just too expensive. I do have some of the Pi 5s from both these companies, but have replaced them with Intel N100 mini-PCs instead. But I'll still use RPi 4's for my 3d printers and other lower-end uses.

And RPi's software support is just better: I've got an Orange Pi 4. Orange Pi hasn't updated their OS for it in years. Last time I tried to get it working in Armbian, HDMI output was (is?) broken: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26818-opi-4-lts-no-hdmi-outp...

A 10 year old celeron n2930 based mini pc i purchased for 30$ at a scrapper performs way better than the pi4. Ran esxi and bunch of vms on top of it aswell. Sips 10 w of power.

It seems the ARM SystemReady stuff is only for big iron.

In theory, it's a wonderful idea, because it means you can run the same distro on your RPis as on the rest of your fleet (architecture differences notwithstanding), and therefore have consistent patching requirements, etc. In practice, as frustrating as it is that the RPi kernel patches haven't been upstreamed, they exist for a reason and I think by not having them, you're shooting yourself in the foot (even if you only hit a toe or two). Two things I observed recently when directly comparing stock Debian aarch64 with Raspberry Pi OS on an RPi4 was a 40%+ reduction in SD card read performance, and nonfunctional power control of the USB ports.

Fwiw I still have a “poor man's NAS” RPi4 running Debian, and it works great. (The SD card throughput deficiencies don't affect me there because the system boots from a USB-attached SSD.) If you're able to take the time to make a situation-specific assessment of what works (and what works “well enough”) vs. what doesn't, then in the long term, you can reap the benefits of not having to remember how to handle a single oddball OS in your fleet (especially given RPi OS' particularly consumer-oriented whims).

An interesting further little feature of TianoCore particularly for Pi 4 users is that it maintains a fake hardware clock. It only ticks forward when the firmware is in boot services mode; it is persisted to the firmware's own image file in the EFI System Partition; and it isn't as effective as even a simple fake-hwclock utility. But it does satisfy the operating systems that assume that there must be a hardware clock, because every computer is PC98-compatible.

The problem, imho, is that it's amazing right up to a point where it isn't. It's tiny, noiseless, sips power....while providing what you need it to. Until one day the service you set up is not available anymore, the Pi isn't responding on the network, and then you check and the microSD is corrupt and everything you've set up is gone. Hope you had a good backup because the only way to fix it is to set it up again from scratch.

I'd be inclined to slightly agree with you on Raspberry Pi 4 and older, but the 5 is a whole lot different beast with a leap forward in performance.

Hardware has also evolved over the years. I had been using a pi to run pihole, but an incident one day that caused my SD card to burn up made me go looking around at other options.

There is now a whole stockpile of used “thin clients” which can be had with case, power supply and more RAM for less than the cost of a pi, with other niceties like an extra SODIMM slot and M.2 with a few more lanes than a pi.

These are also fanless systems that idle at a few watts and generally serve that purpose better in nearly every way. That said, the sticker price on one of those systems is not competitive and only the somewhat recent turning over of supply from call centers and other places with low computational needs has really entered them into the market (and also driven the continued development of the atom chips used in mini pcs).