What is the purpose of the Raspberry Pi?

I’ve got one. Consider a raspberry pi like a laptop or a desktop computer, just smaller and less powerful.

I use my raspberry pi for several reasons. It acts as a DNS server for the devices on my network. This means when my main computer goes to something like google.com, it asks my raspberry pi for the answer (and my raspberry pi asks another DNS server - specifically open DNS). The good thing here is I can deny DNS requests to typical advertisement domains. It’s like an AD blocker built into my pi. I also use it as a VPN server. If I’m out of my home, I can remote into the Pi through my public IP address and talk to my devices in my home from another network like I was actually at home, pretty cool.