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I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer

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Re: I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer

#11
post #7

Damn what IDE do you use? What games do you play?

Both of those are specialized use cases by most people's definitions. For most of the uses of normal people, "daily use" is a good web browser and maybe a mail client, and the Pi should be more than capable of running those. A Pi is hardly a gaming rig or a dev box, and I don't think anyone would claim it is.

Re: I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer

#12
Running on reduced power is not even close to hard, what with the powerful monstrosities our modern systems are. The only really tricky bit is to not try to push too much stuff through the graphics pipelines (higher res graphics is effectively O(n^2) as resolution increases), or use code that gets too clever spending lots of CPU for marginal stuff like pretty animations or something. An RPi4 is comfortably more powerful than anything I had prior to 2010, and if you've got decent solid state storage on it you could argue even past that.

It really ought to be snappy and very effective, for everything except maybe the web browser, and that's more the fault of bloated web sites than the computer or the browser in my opinion. This ought to be nothing special, just what people expect.

Re: I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer

#13

about their previous computers: > After a while it felt as if a fighter jet was taking off next to me, constantly. as someone who spent time around jets in the US Air Force, I absolutely loathe this analogy. The difference between a few computer fans and a jet taking off is like the difference in force between a dead leaf falling on you from 10m above you versus a 25kg anvil falling on you from 10m above you. compute…

The world is inundated with these over-the-top analogies now. People can't exaggerate just a little, they have to go full nuclear. And when dealing with a lot of sensitive subjects, it negatively affects a lot of people. I'm looking forward to a generation that swings the other way and goes super-literal on everything.

..that and 'it looks like a war zone' analogy after every storm.

Unless you have actually been in an active war zone, you probably shouldn't use that particular analogy either.

Re: I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer

#14
Linux is just “almost” there.

I could probably use it for my daily programming environment - Elixir, PostgreSQL, Vim, Firefox.

But then my job takes a turn… creative. Document manipulation, convert multiple Images into a PDF, easy screenshots and then make a thumbnail with that. Sign docs with my signature. Access to apps like Pixemator. Share files easily. Dropbox. It’s just easier and more productive.

It’s hard to not have Mac Preview when you need it.

And that’s why I can’t finally switch over to Linux.

An no, Gimp is not an alternative. Dropbox alternatives are just more difficult to use. Just so many little things are missing.

To be fair, windows does not have a tool like Preview and that’s why I can’t use windows either.

Re: I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer

#15

> I use a Raspberry Pi 4 (with 8GB of RAM) as my daily desktop computer. I browse the internet, read and send e-mails, program software, edit photos, create images, watch Youtube videos and play games on it. Without any significant problems. Yes for those lite tasks is fine, and you can also save some watts. The things are different when you want to do audio/video/photo production.

Of course! But I still was positively surprised that GIMP, Youtube and even Kdenlive worked flawlessly on the thing.

Yeah. "Production", implying a high standard of professional quality using a base of uncompressed 4K or 8K might be a bad idea, sure, or trying to run a live event with half-a-dozen input streams and live streaming back out to the internet.

But plenty of uses of video editing would still be perfectly possible on an RPi4. It might be noticeably faster on a "real" desktop, but it would be perfectly doable, especially if you were working in less than 1080P for some reason, like a DVD source video.

Re: I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer

#16
you could do a lot of things to reduce fan noise in your computer, but I appreciate this perspective. We constantly over-estimate how powerful a machine we need (probably because of the bad software we run) and underestimate how versatile and powerful a small SBC can be.

Re: I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer

#17
post #7

Damn what IDE do you use? What games do you play?

(n)vim would work a real treat on a pi. Building locally might be tricky depending on the codebase, but it's not entirely unreasonable to expect to have a full fledged IDE on a pi (except Android development, lol)

Re: I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer

#18
post #7

Damn what IDE do you use? What games do you play?

Both of those are specialized use cases by most people's definitions. For most of the uses of normal people, "daily use" is a good web browser and maybe a mail client, and the Pi should be more than capable of running those. A Pi is hardly a gaming rig or a dev box, and I don't think anyone would claim it is.

That said, Emacs and Vim run fine on a Pi. :)

Re: I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer

#19

I cannot buy a Pi 4 (8GB) locally at all. Amazon appears to offer one for 200-250 euros. For 200 euros or less, I can get a NUC-style mini PC at my local electronics store that is more powerful. I wouldn't mind trying out a Pi-as-a-PC, but new models either just aren't available or aren't reasonably priced.

Yeah I bought a used Lenovo M720q NUC style 6 core i5-8400T 16Gb Ram 512Gb NVMe machine for less than a new Pi 4 8Gb. With a windows 10 pro license. Makes one hell of a home server.
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