If you need a pi, it’s for the gpio interface. The expectation should be it’s a cheap little piece of shit for down and dirty nitty gritty development work that touches a breadboard for some temporary purpose.
As for other dev boards, no pleb should even know they exist imo. Plebs should be laptop maxing.
laptops are fine and all but you haven't seen what these little pocket sized things can do, and very often they run on USB power, you could have a whole home server rig in one with a fat storage raid device just a couple boxes in the corner next to your router, with a UPS keeping it all up and running and a failover for mobile connection so your LN doesn't get force closed on by a half hour outage
Plebs won’t be doing all that, that’s all. I’m king of table scrap electronics & software solutions, I enjoy those things, but not at scale.
