I've been tempted to try out a raspi out for awhile now, if your interested in playing around with one the pi3 Model B is a good choice. Be mindful however that a raspi is not as cheap as they may appear, the model B goes for around 40$, but thats only for the board itself, cables, power supply, pins, case, usb bars, memory cards, keyboard, mouse, etc. are all priced separately. Be sure to take stock of any parts you may already have lying around to save a bit, or shop around for better prices from different retailers.

Ahoy there

Ironically enough I have been considering picking up one of these although I don't really have experience with commandline,lynics or rasbian or the many million variations of OS's used on these.
Sorry for the slight highjack of the topic, OP.

I am considering getting one of these, probably the 3b model although sometimes I think a cheap processer and motherboard with a shit cheap case would be far cheaper and more suited to my purposes.
I'd mainly want one for downloading and seeding torrents, although I believe I could also get it to behave like a NAS with 1 or 2 HDDS attached or a combination of both.
I'd be seeding around 200 to 300 torrents at a time though, with not many of them requesting data,but 10 out of those 300 just might.
What do you guys think. Would a pie 3b be cheaper and worth the cash I spend on it or a assembled pc with just a case mother board and processer and things be more suited to my purposes?
I certainly wouldn't be using any of it that is the pie or the rough shod pc to do anything else but what I have already said here.
On a tight budget, so take that into account too, please.

grryf

@SLJ
  Sorry. I found them on Twitter a very long time ago, and I didn't think to save them for some reason. It was mainly just a demonstration on how to set up the PI without sighted assistance. Then again, because of all the time that has passed, I have no idea about how accurate they would be now.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback! Is there a central hub of information about the Pi and its accessibility? Anywhere where people might have shared their experiences?

Not necessarily, because simply copying and pasting the Rasbian os image to a card won't work. The img literally has to be burnt *flashed* onto the card. There's the dd command, but even if you are comfortable with commandline you may still want to try some nice gui-wrappers for this command, so that you can at least get status reports of what's going on, as the thing with dd is that it's completely silent. WinFlashTool for windows, piFiller for osx. And Gamedude, chances are that the demo's probably dated. If it was recorded before December of 2016, then it definitely is. It used to be that ssh was enabled by default, and it was ready for use once plugged into your router. Yeah, not the case in the latest Rasbian build. Not to be inaccessible, because that wasn't why they disabled it. The Pi's default username and password are right there on the site, so they recently started disabling ssh by default as a security fix. However, not to worry, as there is a solution, if you're willing to purchase a piece of software to do this. Paragon ExtFS for Windows or mac is what you need. It's a low-level driver that embeds Linux Extended Filesystem support into your pc or mac. There are free solutions, but those have been reported to cause corruption, or have no write support, stuff like that. This one does the best job of it. It's the same guys that brought us native NTFS support for mac, it's well worth the 20 bucks. Nevertheless, the reason is that obviously, once that Rasbian image is flashed, you're done accessing the card on the computer unless you have the ExtFS driver installed. And normally, that would be alright, except in order to give us ssh access we have to copy a file to the boot volume. Actually, never mind, the boot volume is fat32, but there's another extra step that I took to get wifi running right out of the box. Anyway, create a file called ssh, with no extension, and save it into the boot volume of the pi. now if you wanna set up wifi on the pi itself, you don't have to buy Paragon ExtFS, but if you want to set it up beforehand, or otherwise access the pi's disk from your computer, then you'll need that extra piece of software.

@jack
Thanks for the information! You just answered some of the main questions I had after researching the product more on the official Pi site. I Think I'll go ahead with the purchase and update the topic with my experience unless i have any more questions.

Ok so what you have to do is first of all make sure that your extFS is working. If you're on windows, I wouldn't recommend messing with this file without first turning the pi on, but regardless the process is essentially the same on or off the pi. If using mac, you've got a bash shell to utilize, and your experience with a pi and ssh is honestly a lot better on the mac in my opinion with all the tools built in. If you're on the windows side, you don't need sighted help to configure wifi on the pi, just connect the pi to your router via ethernet. Now time to ssh. Assuming you've taken the necessary steps to enable ssh manually, you've got Two ways you can do this. With any luck, the the Pi's default host name of raspberrypi will be recognized, and you can ssh into it with a command like so:
ssh pi@raspberrypi
Depending on what program you utilize for ssh, the process may be a bit different. Nevertheless, wherever it asks you to enter the hostname, type in raspberrypi, and type in pi for the username. Wherever it asks for the password, type in raspberry and then hit enter. If that doesn't work, then we'll have to manually find the Pi's ip address. Load up your router's control panel which usually involves typing in your router's ip address into the address bar, go to wherever your device list is, and do a text search for raspberrypi. You should find it. Make note of the pi address, and repeat the ssh process, only this time entering the ip address. If you get a warning about permanently adding ssh keys, just say yes, after all it's your own personal device. Now if you get into the pi's home directory, you're successful. Now type in sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf to open the configuration file up in nano. Go to the bottom of the file and type in the following:
network={
ssid="your_network_name"
psk="your-password"
}
Now press ctrl+x to exit, then y then enter to save the changes. Reboot your pi without it connected to the ethernet cable. Try ssh-ing again. If it works, then you're good to go, and if it doesn't, there's two possibilities. Either the wifi configuration genuinely failed, or the ssh program is reverting to its saved host address. Some ssh programs do that, in which case you need to delete all of your ssh keys and reconnect.

Well there's a [RaspBSD] distro. There's a few other bits of information and instructions [here] and [here] that may be useful.