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.

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.

Not as my main computer, but as my digital piano sidekick, a USB output from the piano goes to my Raspberry Pi which runs Pianoteq (makes the piano sound like a $100k piano). Optionally, the Pi lights up some addressable LEDs coinciding with keys.

https://github.com/youfou/pianoteq-pi & https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-LED

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29377783 has some relevant comments, here's a copy of mine:

I spent around 5 months in 2019 using a Raspberry Pi 3B+(1GB of RAM) as my sole home computer because my laptop broke. You can browse the web if you aggressively close tabs and block almost all js (and periodically restart the browser). Editing latex was possible as was writing some code (although using a modern editor and the web simultaneously isn't always an option - I grew to love nano). I did have a access to a modern x86 machine in an office.

Github was probably the most painful website (although it's still better than Gitlab which doesn't work at all without js). I think it had recently removed a bunch of functionality for users without js and it's not designed with people who care about every 100MB of RAM in mind.

I 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 buying a $200 mini desktop computer that runs fantastic.

My main system went down, so I have been using a Pi 4 with 8GB of memory for a couple weeks and off and on for a month. My needs are really simple.

My biggest issue is that it locks up a lot with sites with video. Since I use the Pi mostly for work stuff, I can avoid that and do off-time browsing on my phone.

The other issue is the quirks of a new system. Some apps have no ARM option. Some issues require a lot of Googling.

I don't see why you would anyone would go this route intentionally though. It seems like there would be better options for not much more money.

One thing I do like about the Pi, is that it's a lot less bulk compared to my desktop. It seems like the Pi would be great for people concerned about E-waste. It might also be a good option for people who use it as a client to a cloud desktop service. Last I looked, AWS and Azure didn't have ARM versions available though. So, I would have been limited to a web based client. If that hasn't changed, then I imagine it could soon.

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).

Sort of... I have a bare-bones system which is based on a Pi Zero W (single core) and runs Debian Buster. It has 512Mb memory of which around 60Mb is actually used. Everything is TUI based and I can multitask by starting up Tmux and running (strolling!) my usual apps. I use it mainly as a Lite Laptop and just plug it into the nearest HDMI screen. I use a spare cellphone for Internet and I can also plug a small USB hub into it which gives me expansion options including USB memory stick, Yubikey and ethernet for my home network. There's a lot of great, resource-frugal software out there and it's been great fun to set up.

Edit: the biggest PITA has been Bluetooth. I was occasionally able to connect and pair, but not always. I eventually uninstalled everything --blue-- and hve not regretted it. I now use a cheapo WiFi keyboard to do the initial login.

For the people who answer this, I'd like to know if they booted from an sd-card or ssd-device as well. I noticed a huge difference in the responsiveness when using my Pi 4 (only via ssh and with a terminal) for some machine learning jobs after I switched to boot from an external SSD. For Pi4s made in the last couple of years, booting from ssd seems to be a built-in feature, without any need for flashing anything on the device first, which held me back from doing it earlier.

I 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.

I've done this but got tired of it eventually. I had an 8gb raspberry pi 4. I ran xfce4 under raspbian/raspberry pi OS with lightweight applications - luakit for a browser, claws mail for email, terminal, and a few background processes. I also casted to my TV from Gnomecast and, later, VLC. Coding was all done in micro with a few plugins enabled.

Mostly it worked pretty well, but with too many tabs opened it would start to become cpu bound. Most electron apps were unusable too.

For me it was a process of trying to spend less time online: the idea was I'd alter my behaviour by using a more limited medium. On that count it was a resounding success. I stopped because I missed games, so now I have an Udoo Bolt Gear, which was about £400 and is good enough for what I play without being wastefully over-specced. Same relative minimalism, but just a bit faster with more room to upgrade. I'd recommend trying both.

I have a 32" 4K monitor in an upstairs room where I work from home with my work laptop. It's away from my main compute infrastructure but I did want a personal device, and a Raspi can drive 4K. So I bought a 4GB Raspi4 and overclocked it to 2GHz.

As long as you can live with slightly sluggish mouse click response, it's OK. Make that very sluggish on heavy Javascript web stuff like Gmail or Facebook. But it all works.

Video playback is an issue. First I ran the default 32-bit Raspi OS, and 1080 was marginal (forget 4K - it does drive the resolution but it's not fast enough to really do video - fullscreen Youtube for example at that resolution). So I applied various copypasta from the internet to fully enable hardware accelerated video - the framerate of glxgears confirmed that GL was faster than before. Video was now performant but with horizontal tearing issues that weren't there previously.

After the official 64 bit Raspi OS came out, I started over with that. Performance is not noticeably different. Not all the copypasta from before worked; no tearing issues now, but again if you want to play local media with VLC or mplayer, better stick to 1080 and if you want to comfortably watch fullscreen Youtube, go to 720. I have some quick command line aliases to switch the display resolution for this.

The device doesn't do suspend/resume, but on the other hand, desktop idle uses about as much power as a night light, so it's simply left on all the time. It's in the open (screwed to the bottom of a desktop) with a pair of small heat sinks stuck to the main integrated circuits. Thermal is OK; about the only way to drive it to thermal throttling is the "stress" command; otherwise heat is not a limiting factor.

One thing that was mostly impossible last time I tried it with Raspi OS (32-bit mode) was video calling with the common web-based tools. Skype, for example, didn't offer it, no matter what the system configuration. This may be a deal breaker for "main computer".

Others have said that the Wifi on Raspis is solid, but in my own experience they always end up plugged into a hardwired ethernet connection.

I've used a Pi4/4mb as my main desktop for a few days while waiting for parts for the "big" system; it kept up with HN and discord, let me access my text files, and that was about all I expected from it. I had to use a different device to access web stores and track the replacement parts.

Far, far better than nothing, but limited enough that there's things you just can't do.

(I've also got 3 on TVs, one as the house fileserver, and a couple that get thrown down whenever im doing a project that can use them. those aren't "main")

My Dad does. Mostly because he's 88 and I just needed a way to send him a computer every time something goes wrong with it.

He doesn't use it for anything other than web browsing. He did write a few books on it using Google Docs, but there's nothing stored locally.

It's mostly fine for basic needs. Every so often someone will send some kind of attachment in an email that doesn't open cleanly with Google Drive and I'll have to help him out.

It's probably less work than his old PC was to maintain. But like... that's sort of by design. Dad doesn't have admin privileges, and it's set up to auto-update nightly.

I used the very first original Pi B when it first came out as a small "shadow IT"-type desktop at work around 2014. We could only use Macs or Windows, and I needed something sane running Linux.

That version is much slower than today's Pi4, and I ended up using it mostly for command line sysadmin type stuff using a terminal and SSH. I used it for 1 year, before switching jobs.

While not running a desktop, today I have 6 Pi4s running a Ceph cluster and serving CephFS in my house. It's actually quite easy to set up, and very usable. Not super fast, because I'm using SMR drives, but definitely very usable as a very reliable NAS. Definitely more reliable than any ZFS setup.

It's like using a mid-range phone as your computer, because, well, that's basically what it is. Everything moves slower than one is used to. By far the biggest annoyance is the hugely bloated web. Although video plays fine due to hardware decoding, loading normal web pages is measured in seconds.

Overall I don't recommend it. Might be better with a slightly higher-powered NUC (Intel Gold and above) or a mid-range laptop - they both will consume more than the Pi but less than a normal desktop, though at a greater price.

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.

I use a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as a cupsd print server. It is powered by usb from the Wi-Fi router and connected directly to an old USB laser printer nearby. Works great to print wirelessly.

I also have a Raspberry Pi 4 (8gb) with an Argon One M.2 case and a Kingston SSD. I use it mainly for coding/tinkering in C, Pharo, Racket etc. Not logged into any social media or mail in the web browser, just using it to read docs etc. Fast enough to be usable but no speed demon for sure. Overclocked to around 2GHz/64-bit OS.

I 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).

The idea attracted me once.

The reality is that a used laptop is more affordable by the time a screen, keyboard, pointing device, power supply and clock are added and provides orders of magnitude better experience.

Or to put it another way, using an RPi as a daily driver was not a hill I found worth dying on. Linux is Linux. Good luck.

As one of the other commenters said, the only reason a Pi4 couldn't be a daily driver is that web browsing is too slow. That's more on the web developers and browser makers than the limitations of the Pi.

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.

I do. I have a Pi I run as a server where it runs PiHole, PiVPN (Wireguard), and a personal Node environment. My main use case is to have a system I can SSH into and develop personal projects. This works well because I have a few machines that I can’t develop locally. A work machine that I cannot mix personal work with. An iPad that has no local shell (I use https://blink.sh for this). It works fantastically!

I’ve made a home “Are you in a meeting” website that everyone on my WiFi can point their browsers to. I have https://tiddlywiki.com instances running there. It manages my VPN when I’m out of the house. And I block a huge portion of ads when I use it as a DNS server.

I have a Pi 4 (8gb) that I use as a home web server. I use a USB flash drive for the OS (Raspbian)/storage and run Apache on it. I have it running in a case with heat sink and a fan. It's quite a useful device for my purposes but it simply isn't up to the task of general computing. I notice big lags when trying to do literally anything. Even just opening up a code editor (VS Code) and a single browser tab you'd think the thing was on its last legs.

I ssh into it from my Windows machine and that seems to work really well. I have noticed a slight amount of lag in the ssh sessions but it's nominal and not a show stopper.

That being said, I only use it as a server and for the last year haven't had a single issue with it. I love it for what it is and want as many as I can get my hands on.

My travel PC is a Raspberry pi4 - when home it's my home server. I run it off an SSD but that's recent because I bought one of those adorable NES cases. I carry it around with a Logitech keyboard/trackpad combo and an HDMI cable or two (USB power cables are already part of my travel kit) and, while not the most powerful thing, it's light and rugged enough for how I travel.

It runs what I need on the go (browsing, youtube and video/photo editing, not to mention SSH and VPN software in case I need to hop back into my work's network), it fits nicely in my carry-on luggage with my tshirts and socks.

I also have a chromebook that I use for basically the same things - it's not great but it's also enough for me when I travel.

Since my primary computer is a 2008 MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo and 6 gigs of memory, I wanted to see if a Pi 4 with 8 gigs would be an improvement. Of course, I'm not using an SD card for primary storage - I'm using a USB attached SSD.

For many things, it is definitely faster: compiling, ffmpeg, running lots of shells with lots of scrolling in the background, interactive use with high loads.

For browsing, it was definitely slower. Firefox on ARM is significantly slower than Safari on a Core 2 Duo, even when Firefox has more and faster memory and has four real cores.

I eventually decided to build my Pi in to a 1U case with two mirrored 8 TB disks and a serial console, and colocate it. It makes for an excellent, low power server.

I don't use a pi, but I do use a pinebook pro as my primary personal computer (I don't like to do anything personal on my work laptop).

It has been great for all my needs including:

  - Running a business on shopify, including all my asset/image creation
  - Development (React/Javascript frontends, Elixir/Erlang backends, python)
  - Consumption (Hacker News, News Sites, RSS, Youtube Videos, ...)
  - Productivity (Email)
  - Writing (Mostly in emacs + pandoc)

Everything works well on it, and for only $200 I don't get too concerned about traveling with it and it breaking.

I'm on a Pi4 8GB now with a 1TB USB SSD (Adata). The only issues I generally have are anxiety around Chromium staying up to date (it is still on version 98.0.4758.106 as of this writing.) and YouTube video playback can drop a lot of frames if the system is any kind of busy. I run Raspberry Pi OS 11 on it at present.

I tried to replace an old laptop (T430) with a raspberry pi 4 as a tv media player, after reading all about how it could do 4k and so on.

The truth is it's just not powerful enough for that (or even 1080p), and stutters and tears on almost any media, and is just sluggish in general (It's not just the sd card, I paid out for a top end SDXC class 10, U3, V30, A2 etc, etc card, nor thermal, I have heatsink, fan). I really can't imagine using it as a main machine, with tens of active browser tabs, programming compilations, open documents, etc, etc.

I do use Raspberry Pi 400 for accessing other machines via SSH and browser. Lack of memory really limits being able to replace a lot of desktop workflows, so I still do most of my work on a i7 powered LG Gram 17 that runs Kubuntu. The Pi is significantly slower than four year old i5 MBP and way slower than the i7 for building node apps and compiling Go... but, it's fast enough it could be usable. I do love the keyboard form factor. It is a pretty impressive device for the price, and has this old-school "home computer" vibe to it.

I went the other way. I used to have a couple of pi's which did different things. They kept on crashing as the sdcards were destroyed by much use - this can be changed by modifying Linux to use RO root (I thought of this recently when I made a secondary DNS box for my network). Now I have a low power Xeon server where I can create a virtual machine for any task and it's faster than the pi3/4 that I used before.

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.

My Macbook died.

I am frustrated that my amazing iPad Pro can't be used to write software, so I spent a few months trying use a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 2 TB hard drive over VNC with Jump.

Ultimately, I couldn't get used to the keyboard shortcut conflicts and the mouse emulation for touch screen.

I continue to use that pi as a linux machine from a beefy Windows 10 GPU beast.

For mobile use cases, I gave up on iPad + pi and bought another laptop.

I use a Pi 400 at home as a terminal to connect to several remote servers on which I work (write code) in VIM. I connect via ssh or mosh to a usually-existing tmux session on a server. When not at home I connect to the same servers using an android tablet running Termux. When I need to use other programmes, like Excel, I connnect via VNC to a paperspace Windows server I rent.

Sevarg has done it https://www.sevarg.net/2019/12/14/building-raspberry-pi-4-de...

It’s totally doable from what I understand and sips tiny amounts of power.

An M1 may be better but I don’t know if it can get as low power.

I'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.

I used to use a RPi 3b+ as my main machine shortly after it came out, and everything was (pretty much) fine. It did instill in me a minimalistic emphasis on stuff, so I got very attached to nvim and swaywm during that time period. Overall it was fun, and the closest I got to a constricted environment.

I actually started doing that last week. RPi4, 8GB. I have it in a full aluminium case that allows passive cooling without throttling unless I really push it. Absolutely silence is more noticeable than I thought compared to a quiet cooler.

The performance is, of course, not that great. The official Raspbian desktop had a few glitches. But I'm using it mainly for coding and surfing the web with the occasional YT video, and it handles that fine.

The 8GB RAM is overkill. Really, you have to try hard to fill it all because it's clearly not the bottleneck. I set up a 3GB ramdisk partition, to me quick (even if volatile) storage is more valuable on a device running from an SD card.

I've been working from home using a RPi 4B hooked up to a large monitor as a thin client for the last two years, first using Remmina and now mostly running VMWare Horizon client. The only thing I am not using it for is video conferencing.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook...

Start here...

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

I'd love to. My Raspi-4 8gb is almost enough for me, just need a little bit more oomph, and rammier and roomier RAM. I wish the openGL/Vulkan were better.

I've long waited for a proper ARM based desktop. If I can find something peppier with a GPU that blender likes (I'm low poly/casual), I'm liable to switch from Intel Mobos.

For multi-tasking, since you cannot really run a lot of browser tabs, I've considered four+ Pi4s in a non cluster, switching with KVM.

I have a couple of Pi's on the network. I tried to replace an older, home-built Linux file server with a Pi 4: stock Raspbian, a 5 TB USB drive, no display. It was very slow; finally I replaced it with a $250 refurbished Dell from Ebay; threw Debian on it, and never looked back. Pi is a fun toy for some purposes but at this point I don't see it being useful as anything but a wireguard gateway (eventually).

Can be done with RP4 8 GB. Make sure to use the 64-bit Raspbian https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/ for much better efficiency, a USB3 SSD, and that the power supply is supplying sufficient amps, or the CPU will down-throttle.

I use my Pi4 for raspberry Pico development work using vscode. The simple (press f5) debugging and a uart for printf() makes things super easy.

Years ago (not Pi 4, something older) I tried it to use one as a small home server where I can ssh into and do Linux things while on Windows but it wasn't for me. Maybe the USB stick I used was too slow, maybe something else, but even typing in a shell and waiting for commands to finish felt too sluggish for me, so I repurposed my old i5 w/SSD.

I am using RP4B 8GB for last one year as a main desktop computer. The OS is Ubuntu Mate (64-bit). The Raspberry Pi OS is too ugly for using as a desktop, in my opinion.

Pros:

1) Chromium with 40 tabs works quite well.

2) MiniDLNA serves 4K HDR videos to my Android TV over 2.4G Wi-Fi quite well.

3) I have an Aluminium Casing with Dual fans, and it works quite good. Noise is reasonably low.

Cons:

1) Some applications (like Jellyfin Server) do not work. YouTube 1080p is not smooth.

2) 10-bit HEVC encoded 1080p videos don't play quite well.

3) Connection to 5GHz Wi-Fi is not good. So I use 2.4G Wi-Fi.

4) My Logitech mouse stops working sometimes, though keyboard works. I have to remove the USB receiver and re-plug it.

I bought a Raspberry Pi to use with my 3d printer. I left it on all the time and that was a mistake. It killed two SD cards over a period of less than a year before I figured out that the constant writing to system logs was responsible.

I bought a third card and now I turn it off every time I’m done with it.

Wasn't there a Linux distro that booted directly into Emacs? That would be ideal for the RPi, I think.

Tried, but there is a lot of caching of processes in windows to make the experience faster and smoother.

Most websites are heavy and what I mean by that is they have a lot of javascript, so its not just downloading stuff, its then having to run that stuff which is an overhead the rpi cant quite handle. I dont know if the javascript executing on the rpi can be optimised but I suspect the javascript is better optimised for Intels and AMD's.

The mouse is too twitchy, it needs a bit of damping to make it smooth moving over the desktop and hovering over buttons. I suspect there is a bit of AI in windows which predicts when someone clicks a mouse button that they actually wanted to click the mouse button over the screen button, ie something to improve the accuracy and experience of windows.

My primary computer is a raspberry pi 400. I use an SSD, usually, but also find the SD performance to be pretty good. I'm running raspbian lite with sway, and use moonlight to remotely operate a more capable workstation, when needed. The pi 400 is my favorite computer yet!

I use Pi 4 with 8GB of Ram and 1TB SSD (in a Argon ONE M.2 case) as the main local linux server but not for desktop/web. Access it from an iPad pro usually (the whole combo is extremely portable) and use remote/cloud servers when processing power is needed.

as others have mentioned, the raspberry pi 4 is pretty slow at decoding video, but the 4gb or 8gb does work well as a single or dual screen development computer. however, I have have been using a jetson tx1, and later tx2 dev kit as my computer since 2016, as those were better than what was available at the time. i also use a jetson nano 4gb, with patched mpv to play one or more 1080p60 videos with acceleration, local or streaming with no issues. i assume the jetson 2gb would work similarly, just use a window manager like i3 on the raspi4 and jetson boards. also I believe the upcoming orin nx boards with 6 core with 8gb and 8 core with 16gb lpddr5 will very nice.

I've had similar experiences to what's been offered in other posts. Getting off the SD card and onto external storage is essential. The machine is almost useable, chromium lags a bit, but for other tasks on the CLI, it's quite efficient. I've had great luck using docker and postgresql and using the RPi 4 as a dedicated SQL server that my work laptop throws queries at.

Has anyone tried working with CM4 and it's on-board eMMC as a daily driver? I imagine some of the bulkiness of having to lug around an external drive for the OS might be solved this way. But I've not tried it.

I don't use it myself but for a long time, it was the primary "computer" at my parents house. Occasional browsing, Gnome games, Watching youtube or downloaded videos. Worked quite fine. No problems at all.

For some things it's definitely possible. For "basic editing/writing" it's plenty good enough for Linux applications that aren't super compute hogs. Which is actually most things that everyday people use computers for. It's only a few niches that truly need more.

There are all the normal issues of "desktop linux".

They are useful for a lot of "portable computer" applications that would normally be assigned to laptops. For example as a controller to talk to the physical world like weather stations, 3D printers, etc.

I just wanna know where the heck I can buy the newest mid to topend models! I'm in Australia. There's several projects that I've been wanting to kick-start.

Tried it for a kid, but little things like missing time clock sunk it in the end. Was replaced by a free imac hand me down from circa 2010.

surfing the web is a pain. I use a phone for webmail stuff, otherwise fallback to tui. rpi400 with alpine 64bit, external 1To SSD usb 3.

I 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.

The problem with the rpi is it's basically a gpu with a cpu bolted on. All the power is in the gpu.

ChromeOS. But share filesystem & monitor with a NVidia Jetson. 100% ARM, lo power, <1 dB ;)

Would be curious if anyone has run https://www.mightyapp.com/ on a Pi, had success, and saw the combo as a suitable thin-client replacement for a bigger machine.

No, it's lovely as my DHCP/ DNS server running pi hole + networked VPN though

I use three Pi’s. I have two realtime dashboards with one running Homebridge. I also have on specifically for running a VPN. I’m very satisfied with them but I would never ever consider them for general usage computing.

I'm trying real hard... but until the KWh is >$1 on average I'll keep the Intel + 1030 going.

That said I keep all my software compatible and I'm 100% sure I will be switching in the next 10 years.

No, but I used a netbook with 1gb of ram as my only main machine in the 00s.

I doubt it would fly today because the web sucks and websites are huge memory drain

RPI are quite powerful nowadays so it wouldn't surprise me much

You'll have no problems if you just want to surf the internet, pay bills, write some small scripts.

You'll probably run into issues if you try to run a full stack with Docker + React + whatever you use.

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.

Pishop.ca shows "Notify me" eternally for most of the Pi products. I'm actually thinking about getting a Pico and start learning arm assembly.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27796821

I use my Raspberry Pi 3 as my home RAID system (with 4 x 8 TB hdd). Not very fast, but definitely cheap with a low energy usage.

I tried to.. But no, even the Pi 4 was too slow.

No, not when you don't have to spend much money to buy a used laptop that will leave any Pi in the dust, performance-wise.

I've done so as a trial for a week, and then while traveling. It's not something I'd want to do unless the tiny form factor and price were strict requirements. I found it perfectly adequate for my style of programming (vim + command line), and occasional web browsing (limited when traveling, just to assist in doing stuff off the computer, like buying tickets, but even then, I'd mostly use my phone).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783775

> I spent some time traveling where my only computer was a Raspberry Pi 4 running 64 bit mode, and the only sensible graphics performance I could get in wayland was with “foot”. https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

> I was really only using it while staying with family and friends where I was always able to use an old monitor or a tiny "bedroom/kitchen" TV, but a hotel TV would be fine too (I'm assuming ports aren't blocked). I brought a Logitech K400 which is small, wireless, and has a builtin trackpad. Was also only using it for programming and basic web browsing. I don't recommend the keyboard (keys are a bit wobbly, some odd key positioning and shapes, definitely takes some getting used to, and the trackpad is relatively poor), but I just wanted something I could use for an hour or two a day, and it was perfectly acceptable for that. If I had to use it for a few more hours, I'd just bring a proper keyboard and mouse (weight permitting).

> I was confident I'd be fine though, I set it up in advance and used it briefly on the couch with a tiny monitor for about a week.

> I strongly recommend taking advantage of the USB HDD boot that's now supported on Pi 4 -- even some 15 year old 60GB spinning platter you have lying around from a long dead laptop is in my experience going to be faster than an SD card. USB3 to SATA connectors are cheap and reliable.

> The reason I did it was just trying not to be wasteful. My laptop died and I have no problem getting a new one, but I'm pretty sure I'll need a new one in a year for work -- the problem is I won't know the specifications (even OS, architecture, etc.) that I'll need until then, so I just wanted to see if I could get away without having to guess in advance. Generally I like to buy only when I need to, and to buy the best thing available at that time (within reason), and use that for a long time.

My uses that are not as a main computer, are that I use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ primarily as a Plex server (streaming content from two big USB3 connected WD HDDs to a PS4 via DLNA), but also a few other things (gitea, Time Machine (though my Macbook is now defunct), tunneling to a supercheap VPS elsewhere). I also use that same RPi3B+ and a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB, running in 64-bit mode) for occasional ARM dev (armv7h and aarch64, respectively), but it's purely educational (assembly, etc.)

I've been using Pis around my office (and various other ARM small board computers of similar capabilities) for quite a few years now, and as they've become more capable, I use them for more.

I've spilled quite a bit of digital ink on the variety of systems as well (the tag includes some of the other systems too): https://www.sevarg.net/tag/raspberrypi/

Computers I've used as "desktop grade systems" over the past 5 years or so:

- Raspberry Pi 3B/3B+

- nVidia Jetson Nano

- Raspberry Pi 4 8GB

- ODroid N2/N2+

- PineBook Pro

Advice and notes from this process:

- If you try to run from SD card, you're going to have an awful time of it. They're just not fast enough to be useful for more than very light use. You either need a USB SSD or, on some systems, you can use eMMC modules that, in my experience, perform well enough to be "not the main pain point." The PineBook Pro supports NVMe, I've just never found the eMMC disk performance to be bad enough to really be a limit. But improving the disk IO from SD cards is critical to desktop use.

- 1GB of RAM is useful but painful. 4GB is fine, but you feel some pain in AArch64 from memory pressure (and nobody's doing ILP32 distros). The Pi4 with 8GB and a 32-bit install has memory for miles - it's quite free from memory pressure. You can gain a lot using zswap (not zram, they're different) to front swap and do some compressed page stuff before touching actual disk swap. It compresses data into RAM and is both far faster and far lighter on the disk than going to swap, but you still want a big swap file on the disk to handle paging stuff out. If you're beating on it, you'll have a bad time, but "pushing stuff that's not going to be used for a long while if ever again" out to disk is entirely useful, and helps free the limited RAM for actual use.

- You can improve your life dramatically with heavy ad blocking or script blocking in browsers. Pihole, Ghostery, Noscript, any of those. They make a huge, huge difference in how browsers perform on lower speed ARM boxes.

- Fix the governor settings. If it's hardwired, use the performance CPU governor and pin the CPU clocks wide open. If it's portable, schedutil is radically nicer than ondemand for handling real world use cases, though the difference in battery life between that and performance isn't substantial. I freely use both on the PBP. When modern Electron apps lag badly until you start typing a few words in, it's a governor issue.

I won't claim they're as nice as a decent x86 system, but I've been trying to get away from x86 for a while, had a very nice M1 until Apple pissed me off, so they're most of what I use as computing devices anymore.

If your goal is "I want all the features of a high end x86 box but for cheap," you're going to be disappointed. But they're remarkably useful computers, and do quite a few things, very well.

yes but... raspberry pis suck. they have never not sucked in terms of performance. I have used a Vim3 as a desktop. I continue to use a Duet 5 as a laptop. Does that count?