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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I literally LOL'd upon reading this.

While I personally hate using Windows, I have been trying to get family members to update their machines from Windows Vista, and they won't because "new machines are too expensive and their computer works fine", and despite my best efforts, I cannot get said family members to let me install a Linux on there.

A Raspberry Pi is cheap enough that I might be able to swing them to using something a bit more modern.

EDIT: Not 100% sure why I'm being downvoted for this. Clearly I didn't realize how slow Windows would be.

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And they will hate it with a heat of a thousand suns...it's slow enough without bloat. Not a desktop computer except for the truly patient or desperate. (Excellent for many tasks, but local interactive desktop not one of them - a netbook by any other name)

> except for the truly patient or desperate

More like the right desktop to make a patient person desperate

Tbh, I did see a use-case: a literal off-the-grid user, for whom every mAh was an issue. Used a RPi with the tiny display and wired kbd...but I think he went for text-mode Raspbian, for lower consumption, too.

It's going to be slow, even for basic tasks

Worse than my wife's notebook?

Yes

I've had decent success using a Pi Model 3b as a Linux desktop, but with the knowledge that I'm not going to open a dozen tabs on the thing or try to run Wireshark on a 2GB capture.

The original Pi was just a little too underpowered to use as a desktop. You could get Chromium to start, but it would be swapping almost instantly and slow to an absolute crawl. The Model 3 has just enough oomph to do basic web browsing or run Libreoffice. It can open Facebook, although you probably don't want Libreoffice open at the same time if you do.

I've found Windows 10 to be slow on more capable machines (older low end laptops mostly), especially ones with spinning hard drives, so I'm somewhat dubious about using it on a Raspberry Pi.

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