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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

His list of requirements for a "desktop system" is ok for a developer desktop PC, but for most people it's complete overkill.

The RPi4 running Raspbian is just a tad short of being perfectly acceptable for users like my GF. It's just a tad sluggish, so either a bit more streamlining of the platform, or a bit beefier CPU and GPU and it would be just fine for her.

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The lack of quality storage interfaces is a killer too. Pi 4's still eat SD cards and even when they don't it's not exactly speedy. USB to mSATA/m.2 SATA adapters provide a step up but it's still quirky and you still need a functioning SD card to boot to it with the current firmware.

Needing an SD card to boot is especially annoying because the pi 3 did have the ability to boot from USB and I think network with no SD card present.

EDIT: To be clear, non-SD boot on the pi 4 "will be added in the future via optional bootloader updates"[0], so hopefully this is a temporary complaint.

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

Not for everyone's setup, but network booting the Pi's is an option [1]. Probably not wireless, but it may be something.

Bonus points for the instructions using a Pi as a server for this setup.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

That's for pi 3; I don't think it works on 4 (yet)

Network boot is in the beta firmware now. USB boot is still a ways off.

The NVidia Jetson Nano is pretty close to a useable desktop nowadays too. I run the stock Ubuntu Gnome desktop on there and mostly the lag isn't a problem unless I start doing something somewhat intensive like Gimp or Blender.

Yeah been looking at the Jetson Nano. Looks like an interesting platform.

I really like my cluster of them.

I have a cluster of 6 in my basement running Kubernetes and Glusterfs, and I have been using them for all my fun CUDA practice to learn a bit more image processing.

Getting Tensorflow set up on the Jetson Nano was harder than I expected. Do you, by any chance, have Docker working with GPU support?

I think the biggest missing feature right now for everyday use is browser support for the hardware video decoding. Mostly for videos on all social media and YouTube, or even Imgur serves up h264 video rather than gifs now.

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