Raspberry Pi

The raspberry pi is a small computer that typically sells for €30.
Let's be very clear: for that price, all you have is the motherboard. This means that to have a functioning machine, you need to add at least some power supply (€10) and a SD card (€5). If you buy a raspberry 3 (or below), then you probably want a USB hub as well.
For setup, you will need a screen and a keyboard as well, but any TV screen with HDMI will do.
(Click on pic to enlarge)

Connections:

Raspberry pi 3:

Raspberry pi 4:

Then you have a working system.
Indeed unix/linux machines are made to be operated from anywhere, and therefore once the setup is done, you can unplug keyboard and screen and login from another machine. The Xwindow system will display anywhere, even over the network. There is a nice free client for windows. You can also use a tablet as screen.
You can put one of the many systems on it, and from then on it is just a regular (very cheap) computer. The raspberry pi imager makes creating a bootable SD card extremely easy. The default Raspian distribution (the pi version of Debian) is extremely well designed and adapted to the machine.
The raspberry pi is probably the best way to understand how a computer works.

• It is cheap, which means that if you break something, it doesn't matter (assuming you actually manage to break something!).
• If you trash the system by mistake (more likely than breaking but still hard), then all you need to do is to re-format the SD card with the backup, and that's it.
• You can simply use it as a regular desktop computer. The default Raspberry system comes with a free microsoft compatible office suite, browser, music and film player, etc.
• It is a also a complete linux machine, which means that anything you learn is directly transferrable to any other unix.
• Great way to learn how to install and configure a linux distribution,but also
• to learn to code: like any unix system, linux comes with compilers for any language you can think of (and then some).
• Learn the web:
  • install your own http server,
  • code your own pages
• etc, etc, etc...

There are several models, more or less powerfull and more or less expensive, depending on what you want to do.
After that, your imagination is the limit.

Loads of tutorials

In a nutshell it is heartily recommended.

Here is a collection of tips and tricks to get you started.

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