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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#51

Post by WithinReason »

dfcab wrote: post #47
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…

Curious, what mini-desktop pc did you go with?

Beelink makes some decent x86 boxes around that price

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

#52

Post by jraph »

agloeregrets wrote: post #34
alexk307 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could have been the browser? Or the network interface? Did you ever figure out why?

Doesn't help that the pi 4 has a single-core performance that is 1/5th that of a current smartphone. If you are coming from fast hardware, the pi 4 is quite bad. I would love to see someone make a $99 product in this range with something moderately fast.

Pine64's RockPro 64 with 4GB RAM is $80 ($60 for the 2G version) and felt reasonably fast when one day I had to temporarily use it to surf the web.

Mind the shipping price and doll fees though.

https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/

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

#53

Post by colechristensen »

netsharc wrote: post #36
alexk307 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could have been the browser? Or the network interface? Did you ever figure out why?

Browser engines need a lot of computing to know what color each pixel of a page needs to be, for each pixel: the typeface affects it, the background image of all the parent elements (in case of transparency) affects it, the CSS positioning of the elements affects it (there could be a white title text, but an annoying cookie popup with a semi-dark background means it needs to be displayed as a greyed out text).

They really don't though, they could do it just fine in 1995.

Browsers have bloated into crazy complex machines though that do way more than rendering some text and graphics. The simple rendering is not why browsers are slow on RPis.

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

#54

Post by jacknews »

I tried to replace an old laptop (T430) with a raspberry pi 4 as a tv media player, after reading all about how it could do 4k and so on.

The truth is it's just not powerful enough for that (or even 1080p), and stutters and tears on almost any media, and is just sluggish in general (It's not just the sd card, I paid out for a top end SDXC class 10, U3, V30, A2 etc, etc card, nor thermal, I have heatsink, fan). I really can't imagine using it as a main machine, with tens of active browser tabs, programming compilations, open documents, etc, etc.

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

#55

Post by Wowfunhappy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #50
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ARM is the first architecture in 20 years that competes with x86 on reasonably priced machines. (e.g. IBM POWER and IBM z are pretty quick but you can't afford them) What about the PPC Macs? Yes, they were bad enough that Apple had to switch to x86—not exactly a ringing endorsement—but I'd say they were at least somewhat competitive , no?

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?

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

#56

Post by wojciii »

I went the other way. I used to have a couple of pi's which did different things. They kept on crashing as the sdcards were destroyed by much use - this can be changed by modifying Linux to use RO root (I thought of this recently when I made a secondary DNS box for my network). Now I have a low power Xeon server where I can create a virtual machine for any task and it's faster than the pi3/4 that I used before.

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

#57

Post by wink »

Years ago (not Pi 4, something older) I tried it to use one as a small home server where I can ssh into and do Linux things while on Windows but it wasn't for me. Maybe the USB stick I used was too slow, maybe something else, but even typing in a shell and waiting for commands to finish felt too sluggish for me, so I repurposed my old i5 w/SSD.

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

#59

Post by penteract »

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29377783 has some relevant comments, here's a copy of mine:

I spent around 5 months in 2019 using a Raspberry Pi 3B+(1GB of RAM) as my sole home computer because my laptop broke. You can browse the web if you aggressively close tabs and block almost all js (and periodically restart the browser). Editing latex was possible as was writing some code (although using a modern editor and the web simultaneously isn't always an option - I grew to love nano). I did have a access to a modern x86 machine in an office.

Github was probably the most painful website (although it's still better than Gitlab which doesn't work at all without js). I think it had recently removed a bunch of functionality for users without js and it's not designed with people who care about every 100MB of RAM in mind.

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