Le Potato

The Le Potato is a Raspberry Pi alternative that mainly competes with the Raspberry pi 3b. I am currently experimenting with using Le Potato Boards as low cost servers and they are performing well. The “Le Potato” also known as Libre AML-S905X-CC Computer board is produced by Libre Computer. The Board itself has decent but slightly dated specs, The official page is linked to the above Image of the board for more information. The Le potato handles Pi-hole well while inside your home network but begins to become extremely slow when Pi-hole or any server application is accessed outside the home through a VPN. I Believe the 100mb ethernet port is to blame for slow connection speeds outside of the home network. I’ve had some success with using a Le Potato board as a Jellyfin server, I’ve found it can serve 1080p content up to 3 users simultaneously as long as said content is direct playing. The Le Potato seems to be designed to handle media play back very well with this being stated on the overview of its product page “AML-S905X-CC is the perfect development platform for projects that require highly performant ARM Cortex-A class CPUs, secure and non-secure 4K media delivery and playback, Widevine CAS DRM, high reliability, and low power.”. All my content is in 1080p SDR so I can’t really begin to test how it would handle true 4k HDR. Playing Youtube videos from stock Firefox was very difficult with constant stutters at both 1080p and 720p though using a Firefox extension known as “h264ify” helped but I’d still recommend using a alternative Youtube player as I’ve found it plays much better. (This is not uncommon as Youtube has a hard time playing on most single board computers.) Pretty much any single board computer handles basic network shares just fine which is also the case for Le Potato. The Official software images provided by Libre Computer are customized for the Le Potato but I’ve found that Armbian is by far the easiest way to get a operating system on the Le Potato. My Le Potato at the moment is acting as a NAS (Network Attached Storage device.),Pi-hole,and Jellyfin server which works just fine. The Le Potato is a 35 Dollar computer which makes a great starting point for learning Servers,Linux,Hacking,etc.