yes but... raspberry pis suck. they have never not sucked in terms of performance. I have used a Vim3 as a desktop. I continue to use a Duet 5 as a laptop. Does that count?
Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
151–160 of 194 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#152Sevarg has done it https://www.sevarg.net/2019/12/14/building-raspberry-pi-4-de... It’s totally doable from what I understand and sips tiny amounts of power. An M1 may be better but I don’t know if it can get as low power.
On the subject of Raspberry Pi 4 and Mac M1, I got to compare the two in an interesting way recently. A bit over a month ago, I began supporting the Pi 4/400 (possibly some of the earlier?) with my audio plugins (VST2.4, which Reaper etc. can use). So new plugins automatically include a Pi build, but also all nearly-300 previous plugins are included, and I got to test out a full mix on RPI Reaper. But I don't have an…
That's awesome! I never would have thought you could run a full DAW on a Pi. It appears that all the audio is being streamed from disk in the video of the article you linked. I think down sampling would actually add a bit of overhead, but it's probably negligible. Would definitely be interesting to see how the Pi performed while recording to the SD card.
One thing I really like about this is that, between both DAW and VST's supporting linux, it's super easy/affordable to maintain a separate machine that is solely for music production.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#153I'd love to. My Raspi-4 8gb is almost enough for me, just need a little bit more oomph, and rammier and roomier RAM. I wish the openGL/Vulkan were better.
I've long waited for a proper ARM based desktop. If I can find something peppier with a GPU that blender likes (I'm low poly/casual), I'm liable to switch from Intel Mobos.
For multi-tasking, since you cannot really run a lot of browser tabs, I've considered four+ Pi4s in a non cluster, switching with KVM.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#154Not 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.
Never trust anyone who gives you a command that both downloads and executes any script. That person is either malicious, incompetent or they know the risks and just don’t give a shit
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#155My 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.
One of the problems with hardware constantly better is we are increasingly becoming modes tolerant of poorly optimized code. Fact: all second hand devices like cheap tablets, windows xp computers and what not work great until you connect them to the internet. I’m still waiting to be able to run complete hardware virtualization from an ARM processor so I can turn my phone into a hypervisor
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#156No, but I used a netbook with 1gb of ram as my only main machine in the 00s.
I doubt it would fly today because the web sucks and websites are huge memory drain
RPI are quite powerful nowadays so it wouldn't surprise me much
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#157Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#158I used an 8gb RPI4 as my main dev computer for a bit. The idea was that if I was wasting cycles it would become a lot more apparent earlier on using the RPI 4 than on my main desktop. Also because I had less stuff on the PI (No steam/games) I had less things to get distracted about. YouTube can play 1080p but because of the slowness consuming video after video is not a smooth experience which stopped me from binging…
Right? Its so close to being wonderful, and I really like the raspiOS desktop. I think we're right around the corner from a new ARM frontier opening up.
Tomorrow (today!) my experiment is a minimal systemd linux. Thanks, something in your writing reminded me of that, I had just started reading about it last night. My inspiration was the "minimum linux live" project, which of course is not really a practical start point, and would take a ton of work to build up, but none of the tiny linuxes like DSL and Puppy Linux scratch my itch. So I think a tear down is my path forward, then once I find that, start from scratch and aim for that target.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#159I used an 8gb RPI4 as my main dev computer for a bit. The idea was that if I was wasting cycles it would become a lot more apparent earlier on using the RPI 4 than on my main desktop. Also because I had less stuff on the PI (No steam/games) I had less things to get distracted about. YouTube can play 1080p but because of the slowness consuming video after video is not a smooth experience which stopped me from binging…
I tried this too, it was great to have a wall of slowness as reference.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#160My 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 a web developer, this is one reason I enjoy working with microcontrollers in my spare time. There's something immensely satisfying in writing software that does something useful on a chip with 80 KB of RAM.