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I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it’s just a much nicer experience.
The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC “just works,” and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).
My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.
You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like
echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches
But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).