I can totally see the market for this. Imagine being a young person (let's say between 10 and 17), you read 2600 or something like it, you cannot pay for a server, you do not have your own Linux because the only family computer is running Windows and you're not an administrator on it. This is free and full of wonderful tools to try and explore.
Seems like this situation would have been common 25 years ago, but even poor families today have more than one computer at home. Indeed, every family member probably owns a smartphone, which is way more powerful than the “family computers” of decades past, and a quite capable Linux box if rooted and paired with a Bluetooth keyboard. If you’re a burgeoning hardware hacker, a Raspberry Pi is a few tens of dollars and a more than capable machine for that purpose.
For a teenager in a poor family, spending $60 on an Orange Pi (good luck finding a Raspberry Pi for cheaper) with power supply and keyboard is a substantial investment (and that assumes you can get an old monitor for free from somewhere, your family PC is likely a $300 laptop after all)
SSHing into a VPS from the family computer is definitely a lower barrier to entry. You can get dirt-cheap VPS for $3/month, but this free offer is even cheaper and comes without the hassle of payment methods (no explaining to your parents why you need to use their credit card for this).
Is dumpster diving for computers still viable? All the computers, monitors, etc I had when I was a teen were free, scavenged from dumpsters in commercial parks. Maybe this supply has dried up now that the pace of hardware obsolescence has slowed.
I'm sorry, it's sad, but that's just not how it works. Even "a few tens of dollars" is too much for some people, much more than you can imagine. I teach at university and every year I have students who never had a personal computer and are still not able to afford one. And mind that this in France (not your typical third-world country) and that I teach computer science…
Those can also be had for tens of dollars. But my general point was not about the Pi; it was that even poor teens likely already have access to their own Linux-capable machine.
At that point, you’ve spent well over a hundred bucks on a very basic machine, esp once factoring in shipping. A decent Chromebook with Linux support can be had for about 250-300.
