There’s already some really good replies, but think critically for a second about what you’re asking for:
You want a summary of content made by “reject convenience” about the data broker and removal request industry, shouted into the void on social media, specifically on the insanely easy to infiltrate and subvert fediverse.
Real black comedy posting hours who’s up?
You’re getting bad advice.
If you don’t expect to actually be shuffling packets back and forth or doing any kind of quality of service or vpn or really anything then the pi will be the better choice just barely because of its super low power consumption at idle. In that situation you would be at idle enough to actually justify using the pi. It would suck in the same way that using a pi for stuff usually sucks but you could justify it maybe.
If you plan to have a bunch of hosted stuff, a seedbox, qos, manage vpn connections and especially upgrade your lan to 1gb + later on down the line, the mini pc will actually be more efficient per cycle. In that circumstance you’d be at idle less, and the mini pcs more powerful processor, wider bus and expandability would make it less of a bottleneck presently and down the road.
Risc CPUs like the arm in the raspberry pi are really good at not doing anything, or doing a really small subset of things (it’s in the name!), but x86 is great at doing some stuff and being able to do a wide variety of stuff with its big instruction set. If you raise an eyebrow at my claim, consider that before gpus were the main way to do math in a data center it was x86. If the people who literally count every fraction of a watt of power consumption as billable time think it’s most efficient it probably is!
With ~08+ CPUs ability to turn cores and functions off at the clock tree and communicate back and forth with the os to orchestrate and coordinate it, there’s not as much daylight between the power usage of a pi and a mini pcs as some of these comments might make you think.
The long and the short of it is that you’ll most likely have a better time using the mini pc than the pi and claims that it’ll bankrupt you with power bills are greatly exaggerated.
In terms of privacy, I’d go for the mini pc. All your packages are most likely going to be open source, but the x86 stuff gets more scrutiny and isn’t as “magic blobby” as the arm world is.
Source: I have used over twenty different pi variants including knockoffs, wrote for microcontrollers before they were called sbcs, host a bunch of services on x86 which are monitored for their power usage using a power distribution controller by my lovely wife who keeps an eagle eye on the bills and I literally registered an account because people were telling you the wrong thing on the internet.
If you wanna verify that for yourself, get a cheap plug em in power meter and try both units running the package you choose under some artificial load like managing qos between a device streaming 4k and one torrenting 50 different Linux isos.
100%!
One of the operation types that benefitted from much of that money and software development time is cryptography, where entire chunks of silicon are dedicated to quickly performing the (for better or worse) pipelined calculations that allow us to conduct secure transmissions along to their destinations.
There’s a lot of technical differences I just wanted to go a step above saying “arm is just a lil guy and x86 is a muscly dude who can’t function without his protein”, which seems appropriate to me.