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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?

#171

Post by adamomada »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #55
PaulHoule wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the power macs were usable in the early 00's but they were slipping fast. I don't know if I'd count macs as "alternative" because, despite their good qualities, they are more locked down than PCs. SPARC was almost viable for a desktop machine in the early 00's, I had one under my desk that I was running a Sun Ray server on. We were hoping to use Sun Rays to provide access to the online catalog and other web res…

> I don't know if I'd count macs as "alternative" because, despite their good qualities, they are more locked down than PCs. What do you mean here? Couldn't Power Macs run Linux?

I don’t remember much about it but they even had a bootloader called Open Firmware. Assuming its not a joke, GP has it dead wrong.

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

#172

Post by _abox »

suifbwish wrote: post #154
digisign wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Homebrew for Mac is super popular among developers:

https://brew.sh/

And yeah they should know better. On the other hand, modern programming languages also pull libraries from all over the place without any serious vetting. This is becoming more and more of a problem as several people have demonstrated here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30679098

I bet sooner or later this will result in a major wannacry/log4j style international incident and then we'll start doing something about it.

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

#173

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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

And then some.

I shipped a system two years ago that consisted of a handful of Pi4's running Chromium in kiosk mode, each pointing at a different page that was being served by an Intel NUC running .NET Core Razor pages on the local network.

And one of those pages was playing 2-6 video loops! Smooth experience without a hiccup. I mean, I expected it to work just fine, but I was still impressed.

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

#174

Post by GekkePrutser »

Scramblejams wrote: post #108
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…

The most painful thing was that it took several seconds to render a website when it's normally instantaneous A ton of that went away for me on my Rpi4 when I switched from sdcard to using a USB NVMe adapter[0] with a decent M.2 SSD in it. And I was using an sdcard recommended for its performance! Try it. It's astonishing how badly that sdcard holds a Pi back in interactive use. [0] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product…

Same here. That SD is a huge bottleneck and a reliability Achilles heel as well.

Faster cards reduce the bottleneck somewhat, and constant write (videosurveillance) cards reduce the Achilles heel somewhat by increasing time between failure.

But only a real SSD fixes both at the same time.

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

#175

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#176

Post by rosndo »

suifbwish wrote: post #154
digisign wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a weird take.

For example: From a security POV it’s not meaningfully different from being given a download link for a binary.

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

#178

Post by indymike »

rocky1138 wrote: post #42
indymike wrote: post #35

I do use Raspberry Pi 400 for accessing other machines via SSH and browser. Lack of memory really limits being able to replace a lot of desktop workflows, so I still do most of my work on a i7 powered LG Gram 17 that runs Kubuntu. The Pi is significantly slower than four year old i5 MBP and way slower than the i7 for building node apps and compiling Go... but, it's fast enough it could be usable. I do love the keyboa…

Why Kubuntu and not KDE Neon?

Inertia. I'll have to try out Neon.

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

#179

Post by yboris »

sarang23592 wrote: post #125
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

This seems interesting. Would you mind sharing some of the pics of your setup

I'll try to update the repository with photos & video-link in the future; have been busy with other house projects.

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

#180

Post by walrus01 »

adamomada wrote: post #170
walrus01 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m surprised swap is enabled at all, if most users are running from SD cards. They should have went the Android route and treat it more like a phone than a computer

it's been a while since I looked at it in details but it looks like raspbian has a default swap of only 100MB, you'd have to manually increase it if needed.

https://cloudolife.com/2021/01/01/Raspberry-Pi/Resizing-or-d...

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