I would think the most useful use of a Pi as a daily driver would be a pretty cheap thin client, to remote desktop you to a more powerful homelab server, hiding in a closet somewhere.
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?
#72Earlier 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 agree that SPARC would've ever been viable. The performance just wasn't there for the price. For instance, my 2002 AlphaServer DS25 with two 1 GHz CPUs runs many workloads noticeably faster than my 2007 Sun Fire V245 with two 1.5 GHz UltraSPARC IIIi CPUs.
Also, Macs were never locked down. All Macs can run alternate OSes, from m68k Macs which can still run modern NetBSD without issues, to beige PCI Power Macs, to G3, G4 and G5 Power Macs, to Intel Macs, and now ARM Macs. Notably missing is support for NuBus Power Macs which requires more work than people are willing to do, although older MkLinux was available for them.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#73I tried to.. But no, even the Pi 4 was too slow.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#74The problem with the rpi is it's basically a gpu with a cpu bolted on. All the power is in the gpu.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#75I 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…
Yup the Pi 4 is still not there yet. You'd be much better served by something like an off lease sff business desktop. Even things as old as a 2nd Gen Intel Core series CPU will feel significantly better for browsing than a Pi.
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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#76I've been using a RPi 4 8GB as my primary computer for the past 3 weeks and it's been mostly fine. It's occasionally slow when too many programs are running, but rarely. I'd say is totally useable. Only use my Mac for things like MS Teams, Zoom or Google Meet as those either choke or don't work at all on the Pi.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#77I have to use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ since I gave my main machine to my girlfriend whose in dire need of a new system.
Here's a quite recent (yet outdated) screenshot of my DE in use: https://i.imgur.com/zn2gHtu.png
It's fine. Almost. I'm using neovim as my editor, gnome terminal as my terminal emulator (with bash/tmux) and epiphany for surfing the web - mostly one tab at a time since it can't handle more than that easily.
The thing I like most about this setup is how it keeps my focus centered on a task as there are not many possibilities for distraction. No absent minded web surfing, no binge-watching on YouTube and so on. But every now and then the entire system freezes completely and I have to disable a lot of useful neovim plugins (e. g. LSP).
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#78I have a Pi3 which I use as a general purpose server for experimenting and general utility. It’s so handy:
I use it to automate a large Jekyll-based static site, downloading RSS feeds and committing the content back to GitHub
It runs a few different Twitter bots.
It runs Calibre Web so I can serve my ebook collection via the Web and OPDS.
It’s an Airplay receiver.
It runs Home Assistant.
I also use it as a dev environment if I’ve only got access to an iPad.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#79I run a Nomad cluster of 3 Raspberry pi 4 (2x8Gb, 1x4Gb). All of them booting from SSDs using usb3 to Sata cables. I’m very satisfied with it, I have over 30 workloads running all the time, from simple things like Ansible cron jobs (running in containers, for backing up things) to more resource intensive apps like Plex.
Everything is backed up daily and the entire cluster its configured with Ansible thinking that I was going to have disk/os/hardware failures very soon, but it’s been more that a year running 24/7 with no issues other that a sporadic crash due to OOM that was fixed by adding some swap, can’t complain otherwise.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?
#80The problem with the rpi is it's basically a gpu with a cpu bolted on. All the power is in the gpu.
Isn't it true for all the computers nowadays?