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Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

#131

Post by triyambakam »

trynewideas wrote: post #121
D13Fd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating to me. 4GB of memory is not enough, on an OS "optimized for low memory devices"? What crazy world do we live in? I remember browsing the web with 64 mb of RAM, upgraded from 16 MB , and a 100 MHz CPU. I'm not saying you're wrong in any sense. I'm just marveling at the state of memory use in computing.

a Pi would probably zoom through browsing HTML 2.0 websites made in 1995 without much memory fuss, even in a modern browser. there just aren't many such websites

HN is a refreshing exception

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

#132

Post by xyzzy21 »

For some things it's definitely possible. For "basic editing/writing" it's plenty good enough for Linux applications that aren't super compute hogs. Which is actually most things that everyday people use computers for. It's only a few niches that truly need more.

There are all the normal issues of "desktop linux".

They are useful for a lot of "portable computer" applications that would normally be assigned to laptops. For example as a controller to talk to the physical world like weather stations, 3D printers, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

#133

Post by [deleted] »

leros wrote: post #28

I tried. I just wanted a machine on my workbench to run a web browser. I got the best Raspberry Pi, a case, and plugged it into an old 24" monitor. Cost me about $80-100. It worked fine. It could even play a 1080p YouTube video. However, everything lagged. The most painful thing was that it took several seconds to render a website when it's normally instantaneous. I found it quite frustrating to use, so I ended up bu…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

#134

Post by xyzzy21 »

D13Fd wrote: post #114
freedomben wrote: post #85

My son currently does and has for about a year. I also have for short periods as computers were "in the shop." He's used a couple different pis with varying success. At least 4 GB of RAM is a must. The distro you run also matters a great deal. The Pi4 with 8 GB is very usable as a main computer. I'm a Fedora person normally but for the Pi Raspbian is always my choice because it is so well optimized for low memory dev…

This is fascinating to me. 4GB of memory is not enough, on an OS "optimized for low memory devices"? What crazy world do we live in? I remember browsing the web with 64 mb of RAM, upgraded from 16 MB , and a 100 MHz CPU. I'm not saying you're wrong in any sense. I'm just marveling at the state of memory use in computing.

As someone who lived through "64K should be plenty" and often used computers with little more than 4K RAM, I absolutely agree. This is one of the major "bloatware" features of modern computers which could extend Moore's Law a decade or more with mere software changes.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

#135

Post by LeFantome »

leros wrote: post #28

I tried. I just wanted a machine on my workbench to run a web browser. I got the best Raspberry Pi, a case, and plugged it into an old 24" monitor. Cost me about $80-100. It worked fine. It could even play a 1080p YouTube video. However, everything lagged. The most painful thing was that it took several seconds to render a website when it's normally instantaneous. I found it quite frustrating to use, so I ended up bu…

My wife bought a 2008 iMac for $50 but never used it. One day my laptop broke and I put Manjaro Linux on the iMac, hoping I could use it for a few days knowing it would suck. The screen was nice but it only had 6 GB of RAM, a spinning hard drive, and a Core Duo processor.

Thing is, I still use it all the time. It is the computer I use most often for Zoom and Teams. Web browsing is very good. I use the latest releases of Firefox, Brave, and Edge. Much of my earlier learning around Docker and Podman was on that iMac. It worked great.

I find that older computers work better than underpowered but current stuff, at least with regards to price performance.

The one way that old hardware is worse I suppose is in power usage.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

#136

Post by leros »

LeFantome wrote: post #135
leros wrote: post #28

I tried. I just wanted a machine on my workbench to run a web browser. I got the best Raspberry Pi, a case, and plugged it into an old 24" monitor. Cost me about $80-100. It worked fine. It could even play a 1080p YouTube video. However, everything lagged. The most painful thing was that it took several seconds to render a website when it's normally instantaneous. I found it quite frustrating to use, so I ended up bu…

My wife bought a 2008 iMac for $50 but never used it. One day my laptop broke and I put Manjaro Linux on the iMac, hoping I could use it for a few days knowing it would suck. The screen was nice but it only had 6 GB of RAM, a spinning hard drive, and a Core Duo processor. Thing is, I still use it all the time. It is the computer I use most often for Zoom and Teams. Web browsing is very good. I use the latest releases…

The funny thing about some apps is they enable different strategies based on the hardware available. It's why a Chrome tab will use 1GB of RAM on a beefy machine but also run fine on a a machine with 1GB total RAM.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

#137

Post by triyambakam »

gexla wrote: post #24

My main system went down, so I have been using a Pi 4 with 8GB of memory for a couple weeks and off and on for a month. My needs are really simple. My biggest issue is that it locks up a lot with sites with video. Since I use the Pi mostly for work stuff, I can avoid that and do off-time browsing on my phone. The other issue is the quirks of a new system. Some apps have no ARM option. Some issues require a lot of Goo…

I'm surprised by the number of comments that have mentioned the same situation, which I myself am also in right now - main machine is broken and I had been using it as a pi-hole and print server. It makes me even rethink the whole idea of using the pi for even tasks like that. Maybe better to just get e.g. old x86 hardware instead of the pi.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

#138

Post by digisign »

yboris wrote: post #104

Not as my main computer, but as my digital piano sidekick, a USB output from the piano goes to my Raspberry Pi which runs Pianoteq (makes the piano sound like a $100k piano). Optionally, the Pi lights up some addressable LEDs coinciding with keys. https://github.com/youfou/pianoteq-pi & https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-LED

Beware, that setup.py script is not a setuptools script but builds the other scripts and config on the fly. Install is "wget | sudo python." Then it overclocks the Pi. :-/

I once tried installing timidity and usb keyboard on a RPi but there was too much latency to be useful. Interested in the subject, but seems this could be done in a safer manner.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

#139

Post by walrus01 »

freedomben wrote: post #85

My son currently does and has for about a year. I also have for short periods as computers were "in the shop." He's used a couple different pis with varying success. At least 4 GB of RAM is a must. The distro you run also matters a great deal. The Pi4 with 8 GB is very usable as a main computer. I'm a Fedora person normally but for the Pi Raspbian is always my choice because it is so well optimized for low memory dev…

swapping to 'disk' on a raspberry pi using a microsd card for primary storage seems like a very quick way to kill your microsd card considering the poor number of write cycles per cell on those, compared to a real ssd, and overall write endurance. not a factor if you swap device is on something like a usb3-connected $50 consumer grade ssd plugged into the raspberry pi.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?

#140

Post by mro_name »

xyzzy21 wrote: post #134
D13Fd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating to me. 4GB of memory is not enough, on an OS "optimized for low memory devices"? What crazy world do we live in? I remember browsing the web with 64 mb of RAM, upgraded from 16 MB , and a 100 MHz CPU. I'm not saying you're wrong in any sense. I'm just marveling at the state of memory use in computing.

As someone who lived through "64K should be plenty" and often used computers with little more than 4K RAM, I absolutely agree. This is one of the major "bloatware" features of modern computers which could extend Moore's Law a decade or more with mere software changes.

you may like what Niklaus Wirth argued 1995 https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf
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