“It's fine. Considering the price is up there with some of the much more powerful lattepanda boards, it's a bit underwhelming, to be honest, and the Linux support is not as fully featured as I expected.
It does what I need it to, and I was happy enough with it that I bought a second one, but unless the price comes down a tier, I'll likely be trying something else next time;
I've used these to build a media server and an all in one portable DDJ machine, and it just didn't quite meet my expectations in either case. I'm sure it has many other great uses but for my purposes the pi 5 feels like an awkward middle ground where it's not small, cheap or efficient enough to do MCU things with, but it's not powerful enough to compete with other boards in the same price bracket, and came with unforeseen software limitations which shrank the scope of the latter project significantly.
If you want to build a home computer project like a cyberdeck or something, or even a Plex server, I would advise against a raspberry pi. Many advanced Plex features will not work on a pi host, and a lot of software is limited in function if it even runs at all.
For a small retro game machine or something where you know for sure you don't need to run any software developed within the last fifteen years, or for smart home controllers or any number of other low footprint projects that are slightly too demanding for an ESP32 to pull off, I'm sure it'll work a treat. The price also won't sting so much if you don't upgrade to the 16gb version, which for my purposes turned out to be basically pointless.”
“Replacement for my pi4 4gb that I was running home assistant. Honestly saved my smart home—now everything is running quicker and most importantly it's stopped crashing due to memory runout. Great device, love working with pi boards!”
