Recently I've gotten wrapped up with Raspberry Pis, and wanted to share a few lessons I had regarding them.
It's not entirely clear to me what specific niche they occupy, outside of the tinkerer realm, but it clearly has potential. From my experience, the main things to keep an eye out for is (A) getting a powercord with an on/off switch, (B) making sure that the SD card you have has enough space, (C) installing an OS on it properly so that you can watch Youtube, stream Netflix, etc. There are of course many other things to do, even mundane things (ie regarding gaming), but in this post I want to touch on these four.
(A) Power Cord. When you get the Pi, and you boot in, you'll install and all that, but once you boot off, you'll notice you have to plug and unplug the actual power cord to turn it back on; this solution seems a bit primitive. Furthermore, if you have electronics hooked up to the GPIO array (or whatever it's called), which you likely will at least have a mini-fan hooked up to it, you'll notice simply powering down your pi won't actually turn those electronics off. To turn them off, you'll need to unplug them. The solution is to find some sort of on/off switch. I opted to get power cords themselves that have on/off switches.
(B) SD Card Probably, technically, there is a way to more elegantly deal with this. I'm not sure. But right now I just flash an OS (more on that later) onto an SD card, and then load it up on the Raspberry Pi. But that SD only has so much storage, and if you are trying to locally store large files, you'll quickly run out; you could add external storage, like a USB stick and such, but getting yourself a large micro SD card (like 256 GB) is a large convenience.
(C) OS Installation. This one was a weird one for me, I'm not sure exactly what I did differently, but I went here to get an explicitly 32 bit OS, and everything worked for me (see here for a more detailed account of the story). This will allow you to watch Youtube without screen tearing, and able to actually watch Netflix. Now you may or may not be inclined towards either of these services, but at the moment these oddities reflect that this particular ``version" is compatible with many more hacks than otherwise.
... having the 32 bit OS, then enter in the following commands:
curl -fsSL https://pi.vpetkov.net -o ventz-media-pi
sh ventz-media-pi
(Source). Then you can watch Youtube and stream Netflix and all that!
If I was to suggest a set myself, I'd first get (i) the Raspberry Pi 4 8GB. Wait, isn't a 32 bit OS limited to 4 GB of RAM? (I think this is the case, anyways). Well yes, but supposing more work is done to hack other versions of Raspbian, this would give you more head room. And if you wanted to explore other distros anyways, you'll have more to work with. If you really want to just stick with 4 GB though, you can save $20 going that route.
Then (ii) I'd get a power cord with a power switch on it. Make sure it's rated well; looking for something like 5.1V and 3A.
Then (iii) a case, ideally with ventilation on the top and bottom.
Then (iv) other peripherals, which are less particular; get heat sinks, keyboard, mouse, monitor, micro HDMI to HDMI cable, and a little fan.
A lot of this you can buy through CanaKit (except power cord and SD card, I would buy separately), by creating a custom kit.
I plan to do more tinkering with these things in the future, but that seems a good start for now.
See also: Linux For Everyone: Raspberry Pi — Expanding My Mind with the GPIO
See also: WindowsCentral: How to disable the Microsoft repo on the Raspberry Pi