Raspberry Pi 500 Delivers Great Performance, Convenient Upgrade to the RPi 400

The same question applies to most GNU/Linux distributions for laptops.

The last time I was able to use hardware video decoding for YouTube on my Asus 1215B netbook, was with Flash plugin for Firefox.

After the plugin was dropped, never again, regardless of how many incantations of VAAPI, AMD and Intel drivers.

That netbook died last year.

It is due to stuff like this that I have settled on Apple, Microsoft and Google offerings (ChromeOS and Android use only the Linux kernel, with managed userspace).

The Pi5 is quite reasonable, and the Pi 500 by extension, but I just have two things that I wish they’d fix:

I wish the NVMe port was populated. The Pi 5’s desktop performance feels massively better with a cheap NVMe drive compared to a microSD card.

It would also be much better if it worked with full functionality with an actually standard USB-PD power adapter instead of requiring a custom 5V 5A adapter. The whole point of USB-C and USB-PD is reusability. Instead, for the Pi5/500 I have to buy a dedicated USB power adapter rather than using the existing 45W/65W/100W ones I already own.

Both of those are things you could rig up yourself, which is the point of RPi. If you're interested in finding suitable touch pads, have a look at the ergonomic keyboard community as they do a lot of fabrication and integration.

Neat.

I have issues with Chrome on Linux when playing 1080p videos on my 1080p monitor, ever since I disabled the h264ify plugin that (according to some here) I should have never, ever needed to have had installed to begin with.

On an i7-6700K. With an RTX 2080 Super. This is not the fastest rig, but it's plenty capable of playing a fucking 1080p Youtube video (maybe even with software decoding) as long as it isn't fucking sabotaged, like I used to do with much-lesser computers from the beginning of YouTube's 1080p streams.

(Do I have some software issues to sort out? You betcha! But the automagic shit on Youtube fails to produce usable video today, for me, just the fucking same -- without explicit help. This means that the automatic shit does not fucking work, for me -- today. And I am not alone -- see the other random complaint, above.)

(And this begs the question of: Why does this h264ify plugin, and its friends, even exist if it was never needed to begin with? For the lulz? Was it created as merely an educational experiment?)

[And as a point of comparison: 1080p Pornhub video works fine on this system. Every time. It's just smooth video without problems or aberrations. I do not know what codecs Pornhub uses, mostly because Pornhhub has never given me any reason to care about the codecs they use.

My YouTube-viewing experiences are not that way at all. By default, they fuck up. And they fuck up often. This makes me research reasons to explain, and correct for, YouTube fucking-up. Meanwhile, Pornhub works fine; it has thus not needed any corrective measures or inspection at all.]

And yes: It will always be totally cromulent for end-users like myself to bitch about the experiences they have that do not fucking work, even if (or especially if) they have some measure of technical chutzpah.

(I bitched about a thing in concert with another user who was bitching about a very similar thing. You did not provide a solution, or even a viable path towards finding a solution.)

Some error handling, data logging, tied to user reporting could do a long way here. I've never looked under the hood of YT, so I have no idea of the user journey in these cases. The full picture would be only visible from the Google side anyway and it'd be up to them to figure out what combinations of capabilities are causing trouble.