Another big hit to the piracy scene :(
You don’t need to have a Raspberry Pi in order to use Pi-Hole, you can just use a normal computer running Linux. I obviously agree with you though, I just got an iPhone X a few weeks ago and it’s super underwhelming, even with JB.
i already do have a normal laptop running linux, i’ll certainly give pihole on just normal linux a go. Can you use a normal linux laptop as a vpn router ? if you can that would be massively convenient to me. i kinda assumed raspberry pis had specialized functions for this kind of thing that just a normal computer wouldn’t
Yes, but not with Pi-Hole. It acts as a DNS server - you link it (either on your router or on your device), and it acts as middleware between the net, a standard DNS server (cloudflare, quad9, etc), and your device.
To set up a VPN, you can use something like Pritunl or Shadowsocks. Keep in mind, if you’re hosting at your own home, it’s more useful for accessing stuff remotely rather than for actual privacy / piracy. And for that case, I’d recommend ZeroTier since it handles basically everything.
You can certainly do special stuff with it - Pi Picos in particular are great for building your own hardware. But they’re really only meant for small sizes and power consumption. You really don’t need to hunt down for one otherwise.
what i want to do is host a second wifi network that leeches off a target wifi and just redistributes the connection, but with a vpn inbetween it ( mullvad or nord or vyprvpn ). Can a standard laptop do that for me ? this would not be for accessing stuff remotely, i have tailscale and / or chrome remote desktop for that, this for using a vpn on devices that don’t have the ability to get a vpn app on.
