Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 194 posts

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

#91

Post by leros »

colechristensen wrote: post #53
netsharc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HTML is simple. Add CSS and dynamic DOM manipulation and it's whole different situation.

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

#92

Post by FpUser »

Not as my everyday desktop but I've used RPi 4 with 8GB RAM and SSD as a development computer for a specific project. The goal was to port Windows based device control software with GUI. The software was written in Delphi. I used Lazarus IDE for running straight on RPi so I can debug "in situ". The project was success and amazingly I was able to do the initial port in a couple of days.

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

#93

Post by colechristensen »

leros wrote: post #91
colechristensen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HTML is simple. Add CSS and dynamic DOM manipulation and it's whole different situation.

The javascript stuff that transformed hypertext documents into fully fledged applications is complicated. HTML and CSS really isn't. It's hard to have an unbiased opinion about what is easy and what is hard for a computer to do.

Much of what is done on the web could be 90% as good with 10% of the complexity, but we're buried under too many layers of abstraction, bloat, and "improvement".

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

#94

Post by lkfsfldkjfslk »

I used one as my main computer for about a year, I want to say 2018-2019 or so. Honestly I was pretty impressed. 4k video was out, and I had to compile Emacs from source, but aside from that it mostly just worked. I did have to be somewhat mindful of how many apps I had running, but found it to be sort of nice because it kept me from going off on as many tangents. I liked it but moved back to a regular desktop when I got back into gaming.

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

#98

Post by oblib »

A few years ago I set up a Pi 4 8GB to have as a backup in case my old Mac Mini died. Last year the Mac's HD died and it got me through the few weeks it took me get the Mac back up and running.

One of our daughters moved in with us shortly after that so I moved the Pi to our family room and she's been using it since.

I used an "Argon" case that moves all the ports to rear of the case. It has a fan to cool it if it gets too heated up and I configured it to boot off an external SSD drive. That was pretty easy to do and makes a huge difference in how fast it boots up and loads apps.

I bumped up the processor speed a bit, it's not as fast as my old Mac and the tools not quite as polished but Geaney is a pretty good text editor for coding and FileZilla works fine to get and put files.

Aside from a web browser those are the tools I use most so the money and time spent on setting that up was well worth it and it's more than paid for itself.

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

#99

Post by rwalle »

colechristensen wrote: post #53
netsharc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Enough of such comments. Obviously you have never worked much in the front end or the web user experience, and don't understand the complexity or the difficulty of such technologies. Anyone saying "things were fine in 1995" is ignoring how non-interactive, non-intuitive how web pages were, and how much more pleasant it is to look at a web page and get the information today. It is true that some web pages are using unnecessary (or even too much) animations and such and may have a negative effect on user experience or accessibility, but there is no doubt that the web is a better place than it was in 1995. And I'm sorry to say that your personal opinion does not matter, and the web is never going back to 1995.

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

#100

Post by Tacos4me »

oblib wrote: post #98

A few years ago I set up a Pi 4 8GB to have as a backup in case my old Mac Mini died. Last year the Mac's HD died and it got me through the few weeks it took me get the Mac back up and running. One of our daughters moved in with us shortly after that so I moved the Pi to our family room and she's been using it since. I used an "Argon" case that moves all the ports to rear of the case. It has a fan to cool it if it ge…

Those argon cases are great. You can buy a new new base for them from argon that holds an M.2 SATA SSD that connects via a usb bridge dongle thing they include. I have one setup like that and it's great.
Post reply on HN