Published 8 minutes ago

Jeff’s been involved in the IT industry since before the Internet and spent more than 20 years working in technical support, system administration, network administration, and consulting roles. He holds an undergraduate degree in English, a Master’s degree in English with a focus on professional writing and editing, and another Master’s degree in Computing & Information Systems.

After teaching university English and computer science for a few years, Jeff launched his writing career. He’s written for Macworld, Tom’s Hardware, groovyPost, The Mac Observer, and more before beginning here at XDA.

Sign in to your XDA account

Raspberry Pi boards are not the most powerful computers you can buy, and that is precisely why they excel in places other machines never quite fit. They slip into small gaps in your setup, handle unglamorous jobs you do not want a full desktop wasting energy on, and invite you to experiment in ways that would feel risky on a pricey laptop or gaming rig. When you look at where a Raspberry Pi truly shines, it stops being “just a tiny PC” and becomes a tool that solves problems other computers are simply not designed to touch.

Related

The Raspberry Pi 5 is the best Home Assistant hub you can get for cheap

The Raspberry Pi 5 delivers unmatched performance and value as a powerful, low-cost Home Assistant hub.

Tiny power draw for always on

Run real services without watching your power bill

One of the Raspberry Pi’s biggest advantages is its low power consumption while running a full operating system. You can leave a Pi on 24/7, handling jobs like ad blocking, DNS filtering, home automation, or media serving, without feeling guilty every time you get your utility bill. A comparable role on a desktop or even a typical laptop means fans spinning, wasted watts, and more heat in the room. With a Pi doing the same work, you get a quiet, efficient box that happily hums along in a corner.

That efficiency opens the door to projects you would never dedicate a “real” PC to. A Pi can sit behind your TV, serving as a Jellyfin or Kodi box, and run a nightly backup script, along with a small web dashboard for your home network. If you tried to justify an always-on desktop for that list of tasks, it would feel like a stretch and an unnecessary cost. On the Pi, bundling all those little jobs together suddenly makes perfect sense. You stop worrying about whether the machine is “worth running” and just let it serve you.

It also changes the way you think about reliability. Because the Pi is fanless and low-power, it is far less likely to shut down due to heat or noise than a bulky tower with aging fans. You can tuck it into a network closet or behind a monitor and essentially forget it exists, aside from the occasional software update. Other computers can certainly be left on all the time, but few handle that role with such a small footprint, minimal noise, and low energy use.

GPIO pins turn Linux into hardware

No other computer invites tinkering quite like this

Most computers hide their hardware away from you, wrapped in cases and proprietary connectors that discourage experimentation. The Raspberry Pi does the opposite, placing a long row of GPIO pins along the edge of the board. Those pins give you direct control of sensors, buttons, LEDs, relays, and small motors while still running a complete Linux environment. It serves as a bridge between software and the physical world that laptops and desktops do not.

This is what enables a Pi to act as the brain for projects such as smart sensors, small robots, or desk gadgets that respond to real-world events. You can read a temperature probe, write data to InfluxDB, trigger a Home Assistant automation, and blink an LED when something interesting happens, all from the same board. Doing that with a standard computer usually requires additional hardware, such as Arduinos, USB adapters, or microcontrollers, just to connect to the outside world. On the Pi, those capabilities are already available on the GPIO header.

It also makes learning much more satisfying. You can write a Python script that toggles a pin and immediately see an LED turn on across your desk, providing instant feedback in a way a terminal window never can. When you combine that with libraries that simplify I2C, SPI, and UART, even complex sensors and displays become approachable. Other computers can talk to hardware through dongles and dev boards, but nothing mainstream wraps those capabilities into such a compact, affordable, and approachable package.

An ecosystem built around learning first

Lessons, kits, and projects for every curiosity

Many computers support learning, but the Raspberry Pi is at the center of an educational ecosystem few platforms can match. From the official Raspberry Pi documentation to countless community tutorials, lesson plans, and project write-ups, everything around the Pi assumes you might be starting from scratch. You are encouraged to break things, reinstall the operating system, and try again until it clicks. Friction is very low, and support is widespread.

Starter kits bundle the board with books, sensors, LEDs, and breadboards, so you can work through guided projects without hunting for parts. Many of these kits include activities for kids and adults, covering everything from basic coding to environmental monitoring and home automation. While you can learn similar skills on a regular PC, you rarely find such a focused combination of hardware, community, and curriculum built around one small board. The Pi was created with education in mind, and it shows in every corner of its ecosystem.

Beyond formal lessons, the sheer volume of community projects gives you a path forward, no matter what you are curious about. Want to build a retro gaming console, a network-wide ad blocker, or a low-cost NAS for your home lab? There are step-by-step guides, example configurations, and entire communities dedicated to answering your questions when you get stuck. Other computers have documentation and forums as well, but few have such a tight connection between the hardware and a learning culture that assumes anyone can get started.

Cheap clusters for serious experimentation

Play with distributed systems without data center costs

Credit: Intisy/MakerWorld

If you want to experiment with clustering, containers, or distributed systems, traditional hardware quickly becomes expensive. Cluster three or four desktops or servers together, and you immediately run into power, noise, and space problems. Raspberry Pis turn that whole equation on its head by making it realistic to build a small cluster on a shelf, both from a budget and power perspective. A handful of boards, a switch, and a power strip are enough to explore ideas that usually live in data centers.

This is especially valuable when you are learning technologies like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, or distributed databases. You can spin up multiple nodes, simulate failures, and experiment with upgrades without worrying about breaking anything important. If you make a mistake, you can reflash an SD card and be ready to go again. Trying to do the same with cloud instances or larger hardware can be stressful and expensive, especially if you are just beginning and will likely misconfigure a few times.

There is also something convenient about seeing your cluster as a physical collection of tiny boards. You can label them, wire them, and physically reorganize your network as you experiment with topologies. That hands-on relationship with the hardware reinforces concepts that can feel abstract when everything is virtualized or hidden behind a web console. Other computers can form clusters, of course, but none match the Raspberry Pi’s combination of low cost, small size, low power, and flexibility for this kind of hands-on experimentation.

The perfect sandbox for home labs

Break everything today without risking tomorrow’s setup

A Raspberry Pi is one of the safest places to try something new without risking the machines you rely on every day. If you want to test a new operating system, try a different firewall, or see what happens when you reconfigure your DNS, the Pi lets you do that in isolation. If it all goes wrong, you pull the SD card, write a fresh image, and you are back to a clean slate in minutes. That kind of reset is not so easy on a laptop that also holds your documents, photos, and work projects.

This makes the Pi ideal for home lab roles that might be unstable or experimental. You can dedicate one board to beta versions of software, nightly builds, or new self-hosted services you are not yet sure about. If that board crashes or gets corrupted, the rest of your network keeps humming along. It encourages curiosity and experimentation because the worst-case scenario is a few minutes of reimaging, not a night spent recovering a critical desktop or server.

The small form factor also allows you to place these sandboxes wherever they make sense in your home or office. One Pi can live near your router, another behind the TV, and a third on your desk running a dashboard or dev environment. Each of them can be tailored to a single purpose and wiped at any time without ceremony. Other computers can be repurposed, but the Raspberry Pi is uniquely well-suited for throwaway experiments and dedicated roles that you might change every few months.

Raspberry Pi keeps outshining bigger systems where it matters

When you look past raw performance charts and spec sheets, the Raspberry Pi fills a set of roles that other computers rarely touch so gracefully. It spends pennies on power while delivering real services, invites direct hardware tinkering with its GPIO pins, and sits at the center of an education ecosystem that makes learning approachable.

A Raspberry Pi is one of the safest places to try something new without risking the machines you rely on every day.

The Raspberry Pi lets you experiment with clustering and distributed systems at home without sounding like a server room, and it becomes a safe sandbox for any unusual idea you want to test. That combination of traits is why, in so many corners of home labs and DIY projects, the Raspberry Pi quietly does the job better than anything else.

Raspberry Pi 5

$88 $99 Save $11

CPU Arm Cortex-A76 (quad-core, 2.4GHz)

Memory Up to 8GB LPDDR4X SDRAM

Operating System Raspberry Pi OS (official)

Ports 2× USB 3.0, 2× USB 2.0, Ethernet, 2x micro HDMI, 2× 4-lane MIPI transceivers, PCIe Gen 2.0 interface, USB-C, 40-pin GPIO header

GPU VideoCore VII

Don’t let its small form factor fool you, there are plenty of ways the raspberry Pi truly outshines all other computers.