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

I 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 content and not doing what I need to do.

Overall the experiment was positive. The reason I stopped was because I ran into issues getting certain libraries to work correctly on the RPI 4 and it was getting more annoying to solve that than doing my actual work. I did a similar experiment with an RPI3 and while it is definitely slower than the RPI4 the issue was not the speed so much as the RAM. Having Emacs, a pdf manual open, the OS in the background, and the software I was working on running started getting me dangerously close to the 1Gb limit, and I had certain compilations outright fail because of that. I think 2gb definitely gives you the minimum amount of head room to make an RPI4 a viable option. The other bottleneck is the SD card. I think a 4gb RPI4 with a slight overclock, and SSD is would probably the sweet spot for this type of exercise.

I did this in college to write essays - a computer which was so old, it could only run a micro distro of linux, where the only "program" was a word processor.

This is making me nostalgic for the "Alphasmart" [1] word processor I had in 8th grade. Such a simple yet powerful device. My favorite part of how "simple" it was: when you wanted to transfer the text to your computer, you hit transfer and it "typed" the characters one at a time until everything was typed. It was fast enough and no programs to install.

[1]: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1068705694/alphasmart-3000-word...

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 devices. Ubuntu MATE is fine too but not quite as optimized.

Always the biggest challenge is web browsing. Keep your tabs under control and web browsing on the Pi4 with 8 GB is fine. Firefox or Chrome doesn't matter too much. FF seems to be a little better on memory when memory is low (seems like maybe it swaps tab memory out to disk?) but I still use Auto Tab Discard to sleep tabs that aren't used.

I tried daily-driving my 8GB pi 4, coming from a ~2014 i7 laptop with 16 GB of RAM (with all Spectre mitigations disabled).

I loaded up Manjaro ARM on a Crucial NVMe, attached using a UASP-capable USB3 case. I used Sway and the new, FOSS GPU drivers, and enabled hardware acceleration in chromium and vscode.

To my surprise, the browsing experience was absolutely OK, I couldn't notice any lag on most websites, including hw-accelerated YouTube, with the only exception being gitlab.

All other apps (mainly Telegram Desktop, zutty) worked absolutely fine, no difference at all from my daily driver.

Rust compilation also felt normal, it actually felt weird not hearing any fans with 100% CPU usage :)

The only minor disappointment was vscode: for some reason, even when using the same acceleration flags used in chromium, switching files took ~500 ms, which was the main dealbreaker for me (and for some reason the acceleration flags slowed down everything even more, or simply had no effect, quite the opposite of chromium).

I briefly considered learning vim, since it has LSP integration I could keep using all the language servers I used in vscode, but in the end switched back to my laptop after lasting two days (and I probably would've switched back anyway, since I usually work outside with my laptop in spring).

Unless done for financial reasons I don’t see the point. Time is a finite resource and being frustrated with a slow laggy desktop isn’t worth it.

Might work for the vi/ emacs only crowd though.

They’re very cool for non-daily driver though