I am experimenting with a Raspberry pi 3 at the moment, £35 for the computer (had to find a monitor, mouse and keyboard from the junk cupboard plus a pair of earphones with 3.5mm jack). Downloaded Raspbian (Linux) free download and was gobsmacked at the programs that come with it, Chrome internet browser, Libre Office = equivalent of MS Excel, word, powerpoint, which will open and edit windows documents, also PDF writer and opener. Has 4 USB ports an ethernet socket and wi-fi and bluetooth built in, but best of all it has a built in adblocker, some sites complain about it but I ignore them, I am using it as my browser at the moment and it is just great not to have ads popping up all over. Pretty fast as well, uses an ARM processor and has 40 digital Input / output pins to control real world objects. The story of the raspberry Pi is interesting, it was in about 2006 that Computer science lecturers at Cambridge noticed a big drop off in incoming students knowledge of computers and programming, they got together with ARM (Cambridge based processor designers ) to put together a cheap ($25) computer that people could use to build up their knowledge, the first Pi the Pi Zero was actually given away with a magazine, they chose Linux operating system and to date have distributed over 19 million Pi's of various CPU performance and hardware configurations, they do not stop making older models when they bring out a new one because businesses and project people still buy them as they have based products on them, and their performance is ample for what they need.
Pi will run KODI (free download) and quality of media is surprisingly good.
People have used the Pi for some amazing projects, and Linux is far better than Windows. In fact I am so used to browsing without ads and rubbish popping up that I now find them doubly annoying when I use the windows based PC.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/ras...s-sale-now-35/