I Replaced My MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB for a Day | Hacker News Reader

I Replaced My MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB for a Day

jeffgeerling.com

169 pointsgeerlingguy216 comments

Although not wrong, and full of interesting details, this is a really puzzling article. It feels a little like writing about how you couldn't get your toaster to boil noodles. (Though not as unsafe.)

I use Linux as my main desktop and have always found it very pleasant, but if my main thing was video editing, I wouldn't try to do it with Linux on ARM64 and then grumble when it turned out not to work very well.

(Of course what makes the article worth reading is the fact that its author has tried just that, and reported on it. It's an interesting report! It's simply odd that the article seems so disappointed, since surely few readers would have expected any other result.)

I had the same feeling. Most of the article was about challenges the author has with Linux in a single day of trying. My SO could have written the exact same article about the time her work gave her an iPhone when she's been an Android users since 2011.

It's like me deciding to learn Polish and giving up at the end of the day because I'm not fluent. (I actually tried for three months before deciding the pierogi was the only word I needed).

> If your use of the computer is more oriented towards the browser, a code editor, and the command line (e.g. backend web development, infrastructure development, writing/blogging, and the like), the Pi is perfectly adequate, and with 8GB of RAM, Chromium runs just fine, even if you have a bunch of tabs open.

The author does a good job of going into the separate use-cases.

A colleague has effectively abandoned local dev. His "local" is Digital Ocean. If the project is critial he locks it down by only letting his IP in. Gives new meaning to "virtual desktop."

I'm sold on the idea but I will likely go with VS Code instead. He uses Vim. God bless him :)

In this context the Pi feels intriguing. I'm going to run this past him.

For me, a used USFF x86 box fits the bill better. It's not hard to find a $~125 Lenovo m93p "tiny". With an i5 x86-64, 8GB, and a small, but real SSD.

At first, $125 seems like a lot more than the 8GB Rpi will cost you, but things like a power supply, enclosure, and an SSD add up.

That's a good point. What about an older Win * laptop that support a popular distro? Where can I find a list of such machines? My work provides a MBP but for myself I want to go further.

Note: I've traditionally been a Windows person. Mind you Win 10 has distro support, I might as well keep going :)

There are some plugins (I haven't used them) for using VS Code with remote instances. You can also use sshfs to mount the remote system and use VS Code as if the files were on your local system.

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...

My understanding is that that plugin is proprietary and only works on official MS builds of VS Code. There don’t appear to be official builds for Linux on arm64, so I suspect you may not be able to run this on a Pi.

But yeah sshfs would work, of course, as would e.g. Emacs’s TRAMP mode.

Right. I'm familiar but have not used. Once I realized this was possible it opened my mind and vision to other possibilities. I hope :)

I've been migrating to this for the past few months. Using VSCode server, and VIM. Trying to wean off VSCode and use VIM alone but still getting used to it.

Working more and more off my iPad since almost nothing is local anymore.

Funny enough, the colleague I mentioned wrote a blog post on using an ipad in that way.

I run VS Code in a container on an SBC with no complaints.

Incidentally, an (analog) toaster should have no problem boiling water if turned on and dropped into a bucket. The heating element lifespan would probably be short and it would be tremendously unsafe, but it's just a resistive heater.

You may need to cut the ground wire to the toaster if the circuit has a ground fault circuit interrupter, though.

You sound like a Linux user :)

<snort>

Wouldn't the exposed wiring cause electrolysis if the water is conductive enough (possibly due to contamination)?

Seems like a useful way to get hydrogen and oxygen, then, provided you can capture/separate the gases and someone else is paying the power bill.

I should try this for Hindenburg 2: Electric Boogaloo.

I wish the lessons of OP's reality check were better established in our industry's collective consciousness.

Pis are great, but I can't count how many times I've seen a raspberry pi stuck in an application where its strengths have no value and its limitations have severe consequences. The "$100/hr developer waiting for a $5 computer to finish being slow" is a classic. Bonus points for "laggy $5 kiosk in a $1MM expo outing." The most damage probably comes from semi-permanent customer-facing installs where the pi gets to inflict misery on every person passing through.

Articles like this help "responsibly consume" the raspberry pi, and that's something we can all benefit from.

There was a bloke (I think it was the Explaining Computers guy) who tried editing one of his YT vids on the 4 GiB Pi 4 (with USB-attached SSD for the video data), and found it serviceable. Obviously not ideal, but it was up to the job.

Take the price of a Macbook, buy that many Raspbery Pis, connect them in a beowulf cluster and try rendering videos again. Might be completely different story.

Ok, maybe you can't boil noodles in a toaster, but you can cook a steak on an electric clothes iron:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kbx3dv/how-to-cook-like-a...

And salmon in a dishwasher!

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/dishwasher-salmon-with-a...

The beginning seemed a little like getting your [amazon toaster link] to boil [amazon noodles link]

Video editing was at the bottom of the article after many other problems he encountered.

I do not use Linux as my desktop anymore, but I have, and every time I try I run in to all kinds of issues like this.

I recently started doing video editing with blender and it has been a pleasant experience. I have a beefy computer though, not a toaster.

I own an RPi4, and it stutters doing something basic like 1080p video playback on VLC, so not ideal for multimedia.

> it stutters doing something basic like 1080p video playback on VLC

That is interesting. What bitrate are the files?

Encoding is probably more important. Without acceleration from a hardware codec, decoding modern videos is CPU intensive.

In my experience, linux is (unfortunately) only good for running server apps. Ubuntu is good but it's still like 20ys in the past when compared to macos (and that's including how macos gets worse with every new release). There are so many things wrong or half-finished, inconsistent (3 ways to copy/paste, no native GUI fw/toolkit, vsync/video/browser tearing), I'm afraid to install updates because sometimes it won't boot up and I'll need to figure out what went wrong this time (instead of doing what I wanted). Linux ppl like to say it's because of HW but no, it's because they don't care or they have different goals but then I don't understand why the same people often don't understand why linux is not more widespread.

If you want to get job done, get a mac, it's still the best choice (unfortunately, I don't like it but it's the least evil - W7 was good too but W10 spy/adware is ew)

I use desktop Linux for last ~20 years. I don't use Gnome; my choice is simpler things like Xfce, and Window Maker before that.

I find the fact that I can configure it my way utterly important, and performance-increasing, for me. This is exactly what I dislike about MacOS: it is very opnionated and rather inflexible. (I also see zero vsync tearing, and I'm fine with GTK2, GTK3, and Qt all look reasonably consistent under the theme I can and did customize myself.)

You are correct, MacOS and desktop Linux have different target audiences, with distinctly different preferences, neither of which is "more correct". This is not Linux "20 years behind" MacOS; it's often away in a completely different direction. (Though yes, Gnome folks try to imitate MacOS, and they are forever behind by construction, because they are chasing, not blazing new trails.)

This. I couldn’t figure out how to do multiple workspaces and switching between two full screened apps took ~500ms. Virtually all Linux DEs did that seamlessly.

That is, except that trash fire that was the Ubuntu default up until ~19.x

use mission control to create "spaces" (workspace)

see

   System Preferences -> Mission Control

to make sure you have a key or mouse button mapped to invoke mission control.

invoke mission control and press the (+) sign in the upper right hand corner to get the number of spaces you'd like

You can switch between spaces using keys defined in

  System Preferences -> Keyboard -> [Shortcuts]

choose mission control on the left and map they keys you like. I use option-1 .. option-8 (aka alt-1 .. alt-8) to switch to specific spaces.

(I'm not using catalina, for all I know apple has removed spaces because it's not something an appliance should have)

I think the issue with this is that there’s still the delay due to the animation. Even with the reduce motion setting (which turns it from a slide animation to a fade), there is still a noticeable delay.

AFAIK there is no way to disable the animation in Catalina without disabling SIP.

This is totally fair and I don't think we are in disagreement.

I should word it differently: Don't expect regular people with previous mac/windows experience (which I myself find very intuitive) to be happy with linux. I've yet not found a single distro which would be on par or better. Every distro I've tried (many of them over the years), I was always dissapointed, just like the guy in the original article.

And it's partly so because people like to say that "you can replace your mac/winpc with raspi4" which you can't (without being seriously limited)

I've been using desktop Linux for over a decade (Red Hat, Suse in the early days, before settling on Ubuntu) and Linux works just fine for me. Granted, I like my computer to conform to my needs (and not the other way around), so I set up my configurations years ago & these have survived through multiple upgrades.

I had to pick up OS X in the past few years and it has been disappointing - I have to brew install all manner of utilities before I can be productive (or at capriciously random times brew cask install. WTF). In all, I find the BSD commandline utils bundled with OS X to be more onerous/less humane than the GNU equivalents (ls *.zip -lh)

I never had to second-guess an Ubuntu upgrade - nothing ever broke, but I don't think I'll ever upgrade to Catalina: it's just too risky for very little upside.

I've lost three boxes in ubu upgrades, although in retrospect two of them were blob video drivers.

16 years ago, I switched from Windows XP to SUSE Linux as my desktop OS. The desktop manager was KDE. (I think I had a choice between Gnome and KDE at that time, and KDE was the more-supported option).

It worked great. I managed to keep it as my primary OS for a couple years until I got an iMac.

Just this year I installed Ubuntu on an Intel NUC, and was flabbergasted at how spartan the new Gnome is. KDE a long time ago was more polished and exposed more settings to me than this abomination almost 2 decades later.

Maybe it's nostalgia or something, but I just can't shake the feeling that to "solve" problems, desktop environment providers just rip features out. UIs keep sacrificing functionality on the alter of simplicity, to the point where I'm not sure what the point of a desktop environment is anymore. Might as well go bare-bones window manager and control my system exclusively through the terminal.

You're not wrong, KDE3 was something of a high point for personal computing.

KDE still has most of the features it had 20 years ago, and has added many more. I've been using it since 2003, and currently on a NUC.

Why not use KDE? Kubuntu is an "apt install kubuntu-desktop" away. (Double check that.)

I'm using the NUC to host a VM instance of Home Assistant, and run a PostgreSQL instance outside the VM for logging (What HA calls "recorder").

I don't work within it on a daily basis. I probably VNC into it once a month or less, just to apply updates or troubleshoot any issues. It's stable so I'm not keen on mucking about with any non-default packages. I seem to get myself tangled up a lot more lately whenever I decide to make any changes to a running system.[0]

But who am I kidding? I'm sure I'll have some free time one of these days and decide to give KDE a shot.

[0] https://xkcd.com/349/

Take Linux Mint Cinnamon for a spin. I think it'll change your perspective for Linux on the desktop. Browsers like Vivaldi make a consistent experience across all three OS platforms.

I did. It's still the same thing over and over again - try this, ok cool, looks good until you need something which is not covered or is buggy or needs an hour of extra configuration. So I sometimes make mistake and say it loud that it sucks and somebody says yeah, try some other distro, XXX is really great.

Not anymore, thank you - I have linux on my living room PC and few raspis and I occasionally try different distros just to check if it didn't improve but I'd never ever install linux on my work machine and I'm not going to recommend that to anybody until it will work for me. BTW: It took ubuntu 2 years(!!!) to actually make onscreen keyboard work with screen zoom.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised with Proton from Valve, that's likely the best thing which happened in the linux ecosystem for years so it's not like I hate linux or anything like that, I'm just used to better experience.

Mint w/ Cinnamon was the first distro I tried (as my main; I dabbled with Damn Small Linux for a bit on a couple non-daily-drivers) after switching off Ubuntu in the wake of Canonical refusing to budge on the Amazon Lens. Absolutely hated it then; yeah, it looked a bit more traditional, but it felt just as inflexible as GNOME 3 or Unity, and certainly no less buggy, either. Ended up switching to MATE and thoroughly enjoyed it (stuck with that before eventually moving to Debian, then a brief Fedora stint, then flip-flopping between openSUSE and Slackware before settling on the latter).

Haven't tried Cinnamon since; maybe it's improved in the last decade or however long it's been.

I use Mint; have done for ... eight? years after I got fed up with incessantly gardening Arch. (Too high maintenance to be my friend, I decided after 6 years.)

Recently I had to start using windows 10. On Microsoft's own hardware. Oy vey.

I doubt that someone who likes Mac OS will like Mint, but it's definitely a better Windows than Windows. Comfortable rather than stylish, but without jarring jumps to 30 year old UI styles at random times, or six different ways to not quite do what you want. Or the surveillance.

If you don't like Mint, then try MX Linux or Manjaro.

Mint was one of the best distros, I've tried.

I'm not sure what the author's background is, but if he did all of this in one day as a Mac-using Linux newbie, I'm actually pretty impressed. There are references to previous posts about the Pi, but it's not clear whether he's used Linux as a desktop O/S before.

I'm using Ubuntu on a 4 GB Pi for some Docker experiments, because I couldn't get ARM64 images to work on Raspbian. Is Raspbian the best distribution for the desktop, or is there something better for a 4 or 8 GB Pi?

For what it's worth, I had luck starting with Raspbian, then changing the apt sources to Debian sid (unstable) and upgrading without issues. The default Raspbian desktop environment becomes buggy, but XFCE4 works perfectly.

If you want to run Debian on your Pi4, that's a pretty easy path.

He's not all a newbie; among other things he maintains some well regarded Ansible roles for things like deploying Jenkins.

I’ve been using Linux on the server side exclusively for years and twice before tried to switch to Ubuntu and Fedora (two separate times during Apple’s butterfly-switch years).

So I do have some background but not a PhD in Linux in the Desktop.

What I’ve found is that if you’re mostly dealing with programming, dev work, and maybe some more specialized graphics work (not just twiddling with artwork and media using the computer as an artistic tool), almost any Linux desktop may be entirely adequate.

But if you do like (somewhat more) consistent UIs and a deep catalog (more than 2 in every category) of very good apps, your much better off in Mac/Windows :(

I’d like that to change but just like Fusion energy my excitement will not make it happen any sooner than 20 years from now. (I could’ve said that same thing the first time I tried Red Hat for my workstation (against Windows 3.1) in like 1996...).

> But if you do like (somewhat more) consistent UIs and a deep catalog (more than 2 in every category) of very good apps, your much better off in Mac/Windows :(

The flip side of this is that the skills and apps you learn in the open source ecosystem have staying power.

I spent a lot of time learning to use old Photoshop versions pretty well, but these days I don't have a subscription with Adobe, so those skills have been lost to its walled garden.

However, I also spent a lot of time using GIMP during that period, and I can still leverage that knowledge 15 years later for free.

I doubt up to date GIMP has many more features than Photoshop CS2 which was a pay once license :)

I doubt it either, and I don't have CS2, unfortunately. However, GIMP gets the job done for my purposes, and I'm not limited to an old binary version that relies on components that will become increasingly deprecated with time.

edit: Ha, Adobe still has the download link for free Photoshop CS2 live. Apparently it works in Wine, too.

For anyone who is wondering, Photoshop CS2 works well on Wine stable on Linux. I'm going to be honest, CS2 and GIMP are pretty similar feature wise.

> Photoshop CS2 works well on Wine stable on Linux

But won't work on ARM, so it wouldn't work on Raspberry Pi 4. If Apple starts a wave with its much-suggested move to ARM, CS2 will not survive but GIMP likely will.

Definitely agree. It also crashes on a HiDPI screen, can't handle SVG or WebP and modern GIMP has more features.

Oh yeah, I hear you. I switched from Windows XP to OS X in the 10.4 days, and I definitely thought that if I ever left the Apple ecosystem, it would be to go to full time Linux on the desktop.

But then 12 years later, along came WSL, native ssh/scp, a getting-there package management story, and I ended up coming back to Windows 10 (power management on the XPS series seems to suck no matter what OS you run, though).

>happen any sooner than 20 years from now

Great news is that Apple is moving their laptops/desktops to to their ARM chips in the next 2 years. I expect that'll cause a surge in ARM support even in linux as a result.

You're right for GUI applications.

But if you replace "GUI application" with "programming tools", then the opposite becomes true. Linux is better in every respect for software development and deployment.

There were a couple of Django-based webapps that I worked on a year or two ago. I wanted to have basic deployment automation fast and went with Ansible; geerlingguy’s Postgres roles worked like a clock.

Thanks tons to geerlingguy!

I've followed some of his projects, like deploying Kubernetes to a cluster of Pis. He's done some cool stuff!

https://github.com/geerlingguy

I have had good success using Manjaro on my Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM. It is an altogether vastly better experience than using Raspbian, in my opinion - even when using KDE. Docker, Code OSS, and a ton of tools were up and running right away with pacman and yay. But it will never be as fast as my Dell XPS 13 DE, and it's definitely not designed to replace it. I have been extremely impressed with what I can do on the Pi 4, but it is certainly not as quick or as able as a full blow i5/i7 based laptop. Apples and Oranges.

Not sure on the Pi, but I’ve found that used thin clients (specifically HP t630 and some Wyse models can be had for $60-100 and give you a low power x64 platform that works really well.

Funnily enough, to avoid all the cables and mess, I simply plug my Pi 4/8Gb straight into my iPad, then VNC or SSH into it, and instantly have a development environment. I would have to use some kind of hub to charge the iPad at the same time and plug an external monitor in, but the iPad Pro plus Smart Keyboard plus a Pi works brilliantly. (Where's my cheque, Tim?)

Can you expand on that? How do you plug your Pi into the iPad, just a simple USB cable? Do you use an app for VNC/SSH?

This video should give you a good overview about what's possible with the RPi4 and iPad Pro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR6sDcKo3V8

Probably using Ethernet over usb. I tried the same with a pi zero, one only need to change some config options in the boot partition.

Weirdly I wasn’t able to do get the Ethernet working. Couldn’t ssh into the pi :(

Maybe because of a cable problem, but I never found out.

Yup, I had to go through a couple of USB-C cables before I found a working combo (See Pi 4 USB-C woes elsewhere, since fixed) but that was it. I use Blink for SSH/Mosh and VNC Viewer - Remote Desktop.

I also used this link to help me get set up: https://www.hardill.me.uk/wordpress/2019/11/02/pi4-usb-c-gad...

Awesome, thanks for the pointers.

USB-C powers the RPi, network connectivity comes from wifi.

you can run ethernet over usb-c, just enable tethering on ipad. pi has build in usb2 port in charging port.

Ah that's pretty cool that that works.

As of fall 2019, You'd need a USB-C to ethernet adapter, and provide separate power for the RPi.

You don't need an ethernet adapter. You can config ssh and wifi on the boot volume after flashing.

I'm not sure why the conclusion is, "Linux on the Desktop isn't possible," when the big blocker the author had was pretty consistently finding and installing software compatible with a small ARM64 machine. (That's not to say it's not a valid conclusion to draw in general: just that it's a bit of a non-sequitur for this article.)

> "Linux on the Desktop isn't possible"

That's not his conclusion. This is:

> So, in summary, would I recommend the Pi 4 as a worthy general computer for anyone? Definitely no. Would I recommend it as a worthy general computer for a certain subset of computer users. Definitely yes!

This is literally the last paragraph of the post:

> But, sadly, I don't think this year is the 'Year of the Linux desktop'. In general, I think 'Linux on the Desktop' for a mainstream audience is always going to be 20 years away, just like nuclear fusion.

Again, that’s not the same as “it isn’t possible”.

I didn’t say that. I said the fabled “year of the Linux desktop” is a long ways off, in terms of being a potential option for the vast audience of users who currently own a Mac or Windows computer.

That's really not a fair judgement. Like wazoox said, you used completely untypical hardware for a desktop system. And on top of that you did use neither a typical distribution nor a modern Desktop environment. For example, you wouldn't run into the multimedia software issues with something like Ubuntu with a KDE or Gnome desktop. And with something a bit less mainstream like Arch or void you'd have a great foundation for more alternative setups (like a custom desktop environment with software you selected for yourself).

Look for example at https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/kubuntu-focal.html.

But the vast audience wouldn't use such an ARM64 machine for that and won't have these problems. The audio problems for instance that you encountered with all applications are obviously related to the hardware, not Linux. Even on my weird desktop running slackware I run Zoom, Jit.si, Cheese, Skype, etc without any problem.

It's precisely the other way around, I've seen several articles recently about the fact that Linux adoption on the desktop has soared rapidly, and you see Lenovo and Dell supporting Linux on a large number of machines nowadays.

The only thing you showed is that there is no desktop-grade ARM64 Linux machine available.

> The audio problems for instance that you encountered with all applications are obviously related to the hardware, not Linux.

When people say "Linux on the desktop" they mean "Linux on most common desktop hardware". They don't mean "Linux but only on one carefully tested machine".

A Logitech C920 especially is very common and uses standard USB audio, so it should work. The fact that it doesn't could feasibly be a firmware bug that happens to work on Windows for some reason, but given how janky Linux audio is in general, I think it is almost certainly a bug in Linux (or PulseAudio or whatever if you're going to get nitpicky).

I can confirm that a C920 works well in Debian Linux -- stable, amd64, on both Intel and AMD CPUs -- so I would guess this is some exciting bug arising from the intersection of the Raspberry Pi hardware and drivers written for it.

The problem I had was “it works sometimes, and in some ways, but not other times”.

And as a developer, inconsistent behavior in any system means chaos and something I can’t depend on to get my work done.

This is not a problem exclusive to Linux on the Pi. While much less of an issue, I have had strange driver problems when I tried working from both Ubuntu and Fedora on my Dell XPS 13.

On the Mac, or on Windows on the PC, at least the random weird behaviors (like random crash if I open this, change that, open this, and then use two different audio interfaces) are consistent, so I can usually adapt my workflow to avoid them.

Out of curiosity, what driver problems did you run into? I switched my primary laptop to an XPS 13 a few months ago after almost exclusively using MacBook Pros for over a decade and I haven’t run into a single driver issue. Even the usual suspend issues I seem to have with almost every single Linux desktop I build didn’t show up.

If anything, I feel like I ran into less issues overall on the XPS 13 than I did in macOS once I had everything set up properly. That being said I suspect part of it is due to having a very minimal setup. I have no DE, no DM, a lightweight WM (dwm), etc. so there are fewer moving parts that can cause a crash (in addition to a much more responsive feeling UI on cheaper/slower hardware).

Most people use their computer for Facebook and email, and Linux gets that job done just fine. My heuristic is that if ChromeOS would suit a user's needs well, so would a properly configured Ubuntu LTS. I've put it to the test with a few family members without complaints.

Shocker: A $75 multi-purpose device could not adequately replace his dedicated $1500 device.

I don't know what this was intended to prove, exactly?

The point is different, on a different reading.

> I guess one point I should make is that for almost every piece of software I wanted to use, I had to spend a lot of time just trying to find any that would work on Linux—then narrowing that to 'on Linux ARM64'. And then I had to usually spend a few minutes compiling it from source, placing my own shortcuts on the system (so I wouldn't have to open a Terminal every time I wanted to check Twitter), etc.

> All of these issues (4K difficulties, having to compile apps, not finding apps) are exacerbated by the fact that the Pi runs on ARM, but it is still a problem in the wider Linux ecosystem.

The point is that the above could apply to a $1500 ARM computer.

However, I suspect that he's not very experienced with Linux, and ultimately makes a comparison that doesn't make much sense.

> Anyways, on my Mac, I'm used to Shift + Option + dash for em, or Option + dash for en, but we're getting off the point.

On GTK, one can use a compose sequence for that. There you go: https://askubuntu.com/a/31265.

> All of these issues (4K difficulties, having to compile apps, not finding apps) are exacerbated by the fact that the Pi runs on ARM, but it is still a problem in the wider Linux ecosystem.

"Having to compile apps" and "not finding apps" are not problems in the wider Linux ecosystem. There's an enormous amount of stuff in the repositories of the main distros, and it's prepackaged. And there are external repos for what's not in there. The software one really has to compile manually is a very small minority (again: in the wider Linux ecosystem, that is, on x86).

For the 4K, I can't speak, as I have no experience.

Ultimately, using ARM for a desktop machine with specific software requirements doesn't make much sense; in particular, because his work(flow) revolves around closed-source software. However, that's what the explicit target of the article, so I can't really complain about it.

What is with Hacker News and these pessimistic hot takes? He tried it to see if it would work. That envisions the hacker spirit better than most ever accomplish.

Looks like what they proved is that the difference is less than 20x.

The performance was the biggest surprise. Outside of 4K video, the Pi 4 was within at least javelin distance (not quite spitting) for a number of benchmarks I ran.

Much better than the cost difference would indicate.

(̶4̶5̶$̶ ̶i̶n̶c̶l̶u̶d̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶i̶p̶p̶i̶n̶g̶)̶

Edit: wrong price quoted for the 2GB model.

That's the 2GB model

$75 for the 8gb model. Plus shipping

I'm not sure why anyone would do this other than to waste time, to each to their own I guess...

From actually reading the content of the article, it seems like it would've been better titled, "I tried to use a Raspberry Pi 4 to do my dev work for a day." And that might have better captured the point, since I imagine a number of us have experimented with using a Pi for work, for personal projects, etc. in the past.

But the current title to my mind is a tad clickbaity, for the implied comparison I noted already.

Sometimes tinkering with electronics for it's own sake is a form of reward. Building anything really is an experience in of itself

I don't know what this was intended to prove, exactly?

Nothing, just another bad blog trying to get youtube viewers.

Yeah, I don't get it either. Has the Raspberry Pi marketing changed significantly that I'm unaware of? I own a few raspberry pis and never saw them as more as either a minimalist toy, cheap learning tool, or easy-entry DIY embedded platform.

An 8G Pi-4 is a pretty powerful computer by Linux-running historical standards. This seems really about application compatibility, not power.

Most people run modern software and data not historical software and data.

While I get that he wants things to Just Work for things the Pi's not designed to do, that's not the goal or design of the Pi in any sense whatsoever. The hypothesis that a Pi would be feasible for his workflow was set up to fail before he started doing anything.

A Linux desktop is far less “painful” when it’s on an equivalently powered device as you are used to. I wouldn’t plug a monitor into an iPhone and claim Apple desktops are painful.

The real takeaway to me is “ARM desktops are a few years away”.

Actually, you'd probably find the iPhone outperforms your current laptop (Assuming average 2y-old laptop). It just doesn't have the same UX, or the ability to run desktop apps.

I think they're suitable for different tasks.

I prefer an iPhone myself for consuming the web and social media, but I wouldn't use it for development work, or running anything computationally-intensive.

Title seems a little cringey.

The 8GB model isn't going to perform much better on these tasks that the 4GB on that has been available forever and the $75 device is not a suitable replacement for a $1,299 device.

I do use Jeff's work to determine what SD card to buy...but the above has rattled my confidence a bit.

The title is classic click bait, looks like he's good at it since right below it he has a youtube video of the project. It's probably a hustle for some views/ad revenue and not meant to be a serious project where he legitimately thinks he's building a mac in his room.

EDIT: he's on the front page of HN, guess the bait worked..

At a penny for a thousand views, that doesn't seem a smart play.

I don't know his CPM, but a quick google search reveals the average (2018) CPM to be $2.80. I agree not a lot, but hey, worth the passive income probably.

It’s part of a bit of a wide reaching effort to make it possible for me to get all my income from open source work and free ventures. I’m about 25% of the way there.

And quick note on YouTube CPMs, they vary a lot by genre. Some of the more popular genres are on the lower end of that spectrum (afaict, based on limited testing).

It’s tough because I have a chronic illness and also support a family of five (SAHM, but it seems all parents have been stay at home lately).

But as cringey as many in the HN audience may find it, marketing is actually vital to any endeavors success.

I try to make it so my work is better than the title suggests, but don’t always succeed.

I literally unplugged my MBP and replaced it with a Pi 4 for a day, but that is apparently not literal enough to justify the title ;-)

Hey man, all the support to your family. I know the bait works and I respect the hustle.

I won't criticize you for doing something that works and I like your goal, I've been wanting to be 100% passive income open source for a long time.

Keep up the good work, Jeff. Your pi kubernetes cluster in particular has been really fun to follow. I hope to use the series to learn kubernetes myself !

It's a little anecdotal, but I used a pi 4 for quite a while doing dev work and 8gb would have made quite a difference when a single chrome tab can take up a gig.

And yet many years ago I was using Debian on a laptop with 32MB of RAM. I was using the "Awesome" lightweight desktop and spending 99% of the time in the terminal.

SSH to work on remote servers, Vim for development, git, IRC, text email, man and less for documentation (installed locally), rsync. Occasional browsing with Dillo.

Believe me or not, I miss the productivity of not being forced to use tons of stuff in browser.

This. I'm not sure how many more years people will eventually realize that web is originally invented for sharing documents over the decentralized internet and not really suited for other type of applications. The proliferation of app-over-web is really pushing it including the online web based video editing [1]. Off course the online companies are loving the status quo since they can sell us advertisements and perhaps our data as well in exchange for online free software, or the dreaded "pay-forever" subscription based software.

I agree it's really convenient to go gung-ho all-web but how long can you survive by continuously eating fast food diets?

With cheap off-the-shelf multi-core CPU (latest 64 cores/128 threads), terabytes SSD, and terabytes RAM (including the new Optane non volatile memory) the modern laptop/PC is even more powerful than twenty years ago supercomputer [2]. I hope that native applications will make a comeback with the increasing popularity of the compiled programming languages. The internet and cloud are only being used for synchronizing and versioning the application's data over multiple devices rather then online data processing due to inherent limitations of remote bandwidth and latency that's not suited for majority of desktop applications.

[1]https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/best-video-editors/

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Origin_2000

Most of this has to do with Linux and not the Pi itself. I use a mac and a linux system side by side, desktop linux is still a tire fire. This is coming from a person who used to run a FreeBSD laptop in the early 2000s.

I feel the opposite. Maybe it's a matter of the software I use? I find OSX to be clunky and obtuse, filled with notification spam and weird windowing behavior. Linux desktop (Cinnamon in my case) gets out of my way and let's me work.

That said, the Pi _really_ is not up to the task. It can be made usable by booting it from an SSD, but it remains somewhat underpowered and has a lot of trouble running even moderately heavy utilities.

Maybe it depends on what software you're using?

I use both OSX (MBP) and Linux Mint as my desktop. Everything I use works on both. Both are stable and solid and work perfectly. I'm on a 4k60 monitor.

The only thing I had to do is have my graphics card do vsync on Linux. Software vsync on Linux is horrible. GPU vsync has Linux runs smooth as butter the same as smooth as OSX. I also had to manually increase my dpi and font sizes to match my monitor.

Do you have unified keyboard navigation inside of text editors across all linux applications?

Can you reliably cut and paste between all applications?

Can you open the menu items with the keyboard?

It could be the applications, but I find to get the smooth OSX experience I need to tweak every single application's preferences, many of which do not have have the required level of control, then I need to resort to xmodmap, etc, this is the path to ruin, rather than modify my system I have to modify myself which hurts but I am ultimately more flexible than software.

I have come to the realization that the desktop OS you run doesn't matter, use what works for you. I would absolutely love to run Libre software for everything, but it isn't possible.

Maybe someone will create a window manager that also does live binary patching and instrumentation, I am convinced that this is the only way, but by the time that comes, everything will run in the browser anyway.

>Do you have unified keyboard navigation inside of text editors across all linux applications?

yes

>Can you reliably cut and paste between all applications?

Of course.

>Can you open the menu items with the keyboard?

What, why?

The great thing about OSX is keybinds are standard between programs, so you for all intents and purposes only need to learn one set of keybinds. Other OS' are not as uniform but uniform enough to not cause problems too.

>I would absolutely love to run Libre software for everything, but it isn't possible.

I have it and use it. I don't see the problem.

Well, I guess running all those favourite Electron apps simultaneously on the Pi wouldn't be a wise thing to do since it would still grind to a slow and painful halt.

I would just spare the Raspberry Pi from this Electron app stress testing torture as it evidently cannot handle many of them running at the same time.

Many of the issues and personal choices made where due to the jump between a non-linux OS to a Linux OS.

Even though the 'default' desktop environment is light weight, a tiling WM just as i3 or dwm would run perfectly on the Pi. Light weight application alternatives such as qutebrowser (instead of Chrome) and Spacemacs (instead of VSCode) would also make using a Pi a lot easier.

The lack of 4k@60Hz is pretty annoying altough it actually might not be noticable with a tiling WM due to the lack of animations.

The RPi4 is actually fully capable of 4k @ 60Hz, as long as there is no 2nd monitor. If there's a second monitor, then two 4k displays at 30Hz each.

A 10" google search can yield https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/hdmi..., where it is all explained.

On a general note, the RPi4 is in my opinion the most exciting computing piece of news there was in 2019, plus the recent arrival of RPi4 8Gb gives the option for even more RAM. This is a sub-100€ quad-core RISC device that can surpass desktop class machines from a few years back in many ways.

The last 64-bit RISC device with a normal desktop I could sit in front of and work, was a Sun Ultra 10 back in 2000. I think the RPi4 comes pretty sweet close to being a normal desktop class machine.

>The RPi4 is actually fully capable of 4k @ 60Hz

It depends. It doesn't like 4k even at 30hz if you are watching a movie. Not unless it is compressed to blockniess.

Dependent on the software you're using, encoding of the video, throughput of the network/storage device, etc. but the Pi 4 has hardware decoding support for H.265 up to 4Kp60.

I've had no issues playing back 4K @ 30Hz using LibreELEC on a Pi 4.

It seems to not be so much of a 4k@60Hz problem as a "this should just work" problem.

> The first thing I did—which took almost 30 minutes—was try to figure out how to get 4K (at 30 Hz—the Pi can't output 60 Hz over its HDMI connection) working with a consistent font size across all the applications and system controls.

> The settings in the Appearance preferences seemed to apply to some window chrome and buttons, but not internally in applications. So, for example, the File Manager's main window had readable text after I increased the font size at 4K resolution, but in order to make filenames and other listings readable, I had to go into the File Manager's settings and increase the font size there.

> Same for Terminal. And Chromium. And... you get the idea.

What a heck of a thing to have to worry about in 2020.

The stupid thing is that I think this might actually have regressed in Gnome/GTK+ over the years due to them being more focused on Wayland and semi-intentionally breaking the old X11 DPI code.

Given that Macs (at least the good old trashcan) also can't do 4k@60Hz over HDMI, that was the one comparison that struck me as somewhat unfair.

Not sure why you're being downvoted - the 2013 Mac Pro has an HDMI 1.4 port: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP697?locale=en_US

Which is only good for a 30Hz refresh rate at UHD 3840x2160 resolutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Version_1.4

You could use adapters on the Thunderbolt ports to get 4k60 support on that hardware.

Yep. And I'm using those Tunderbolt ports for my daily work, but . (And, you know, it's nice that you can drive a large amount of screens with the ports, but I was specifically referring to the HDMI implementation)

And digging into the specs of the RBpi4, it seems the HDMI port actually does support 4kp60, which makes this whole thing even funnier :)

>Macs (at least the good old trashcan) also can't do 4k@60Hz over HDMI

I cannot speak for the old trashcan ones (assuming this is a reference to the desktop Mac Pro), but this has not been true for at least the last few generations of Macbook Pro laptops. You just gotta make sure your cable supports HDMI2 and that you aren't using one of those multi-port dongles.

Finding a cable/adapter that allows 4k@60hz on macbooks might be tricky though (as evidenced by a lot of threads on the topic I found on reddit and Apple forums). I lucked out, and the first cable I bought (direct USB-C to HDMI, not a dongle) ended up working swimmingly with no issues.

Do you have the manufacturer’s name and the model number for that cable, or an Amazon link? I’ve been having some trouble with my MacBook Air and a new monitor that I recently bought, and I suspect that the cheap dongle I am using is partly to blame.

In particular, when my MacBook Air goes to sleep, and I then later wake it up, the new external monitor does not turn back on.

And to make matters worse, the monitor does not even respond to the on/off button on the monitor in this state. So I then have to physically unplug the monitor power cable, which is damn annoying, because the outlet is hard to get to.

Weirdly however, my old monitor had no such problem.

I did notice, however, that even though the dongle is for USB-C to HDMI, the MacBook Air thinks that it is connected via DisplayPort. Since I’d already put the old monitor away I didn’t check to see if that used to be the case there as well, but I am thinking that conceivably this could have some connection with the inability of the new monitor to wake up.

Right now I am not at home, and haven’t been for a while, but as far as I remember, I ended up telling the MacBook Air to never turn off the monitors. However, that is not a good workaround.

The MacBook Air is a 2018 model. The monitor is a Svive 34" Curved Pyx 34C801, with 3440x1440 resolution and up to 144 Hz refresh rate. I also connect my desktop computer to this monitor, which is why I bought a monitor with such high refresh rate since my desktop computer is able to deliver video at such high refresh rate even at full resolution. When only the desktop computer is connected, the monitor wakes as it should when I turn on the desktop computer. But when the MacBook Air is connected, whether alone or alongside the desktop, the MacBook Air can not wake the monitor again after the monitor has been put to sleep by the MacBook Air.

So i would like to order a cable like the one you are using and see if that will help me avoid this problem.

This is immensely interesting to me. This is a developer who is familiar with linux servers and infrastructure but in unaware of all the linux desktop oddities that come with it.

I'm "familiar with linux servers and infrastructure" and would have little idea how to setup linux as my working env for things like editing video. Seems completely orthogonal.

You are familiar with libraries and dependencies then. You know that its a very complicated mess of spaghetti. You also know that video editing is a very high use of a computer. Even for profit companies like Adobe has trouble with current hardware[1]

I get you wanted to write a blog article. Content creation is cool. I don't think you get where computers and technology has come from and necessary where its going. That Raspberry PI would be great for programming GPIO pins to literally do anything for you. This is my favorite explanation of technology[2] and honestly amazed that any of it works.

[1]- https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/cc-2020-super-la... [2]- http://bretthard.in/post/dizzying-but-invisible-depth

Why is it odd? The linux server and desktop worlds don't mix at all.

When I first bought a RPi, I used it exclusively for writing and coding for several days. Worked OK, so I was surprised about the whining in the article.

There is a big difference between working OK and working in a pleasant to use manner.

Every time I've ever tried to use Linux as my daily driver it has worked OK. But it has never been pleasant to use and as such I never stick with it for too long.

I usually use a MacBook but I also use a beefed up System76 laptop with a good GPU, i7, and double the memory. Things like large Haskell builds, anything using TensorFlow, etc. runs so much faster than my MacBook there is no comparison.

Everyone gets to choose their own setup, but to be honest, if I didn't like my Apple Mac+Watch+iPhone+iPad interop so much, I would always use the much faster Linux system. At my old job, I had the fastest current MacBook Pro configuration and it was much slower than my System76 rig.

If I could customize my Mac like I could with a PC build (mmm more cores in a Threadripper without a $10K Mac Pro minimum...), I would definitely not be using a laptop today :(

I've been using a Pi 4 4GB as a desktop for a couple months now. Considering that my other main computer is an ancient Thinkpad, I don't feel hampered by the speed. I used a Pi 3B for a desktop replacement for a while and while it was fine with my typical use (emacs+mostly command line) "modern" browsing was uncomfortably slow. It was perfectly capable of video playback in standard formats but there are problem sites using codecs which are not supported by the media decoder in the Pi. The situation with the Pi 4 is quite similar but it's just about fast enough for Youtube now.

Most any school or office could switch to the Pi 4 seamlessly these days for sure though.

Related: Building a Raspberry Pi Cluster

https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/build-a-raspberry-pi-...

And: Raspberry Pi Vulkan Driver Makes Progress But Long Road Remains

https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi...

I had no idea til this week the RP4-B had dual 4k hdmi output. And I love the idea of a cluster for testing microservices. But regarding graphics performance I think I would opt for NVidia's Jetson Nano.

If you have a teeny-tiny amount of money - like, $75, the cost of a Pi - and you want to get the best work computer/laptop and developer experience you can, for your buck - you'd be dumb to buy a Pi.

Instead, get a used laptop - say, a Thinkpad. Install Linux on it.

There you go: the best computer you can get, performance-wise, for $75.

Coming up next: AtTiny13 vs Dell PowerEdge.

It became “The year of the Linux desktop” for me when Windows10 came out.

I now use Linux for most everything.

I also have 2 MacBook Pros and a MacBook Air but I quickly get frustrated when trying to do anything worthwhile on them and go back to my ancient business class Dell running Linux. YMMV

You see, outside of programming, Windows 10 became my main OS when it released.

Vista / 7 / 8 / 8.5 were really shitty in my opinon but Windows 10 "saved" Microsoft for me.

I have an Edu/Business license and I absolutely love it. Group policies allowed me to avoid all the "auto-updates while doing work" from the start. I never had any issues with Windows 10.

How is your comment related to the R Pi article?

for me it was when I discovered desktop environments and window managers other than gnome/kde. I can't go back to not having so much customization.

This is more of a comparison between MacOS and Linux than a Macbook and a Pi.

Next article: I replaced my car with Raspberry Pi... didn't work out.

hmmmmmmm.

On Ubuntu with an Intel processor I have been very happy with the app ecosystem. I suspect if the Raspberry p Pi had an AMD or Intel chip it'd be less painful.

Your comment made me curious why ARM architecture was chosen for the Raspberry Pi. The following from Wikipedia explained it:

> Processors that have a RISC architecture typically require fewer transistors than those with a complex instruction set computing (CISC) architecture (such as the x86 processors found in most personal computers), which improves cost, power consumption, and heat dissipation.

> These characteristics are desirable for light, portable, battery-powered devices — including smartphones, laptops and tablet computers, and other embedded systems — but are also useful for servers and desktops to some degree. For supercomputers, which consume large amounts of electricity, ARM is also a power-efficient solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture

Power efficiency seems to be one of the big reasons why Macs will have ARM processors.

> Current ARM processors are also often more power-efficient, which helps with battery life. Switching to ARM is expected to let Apple reduce its processor costs by 40 to 60 percent.

https://www.bloomberg.com./news/articles/2020-04-23/apple-ai...

It was a lot more basic than that. They already had contacts at Broadcom. When a client orders N chips, you make some percentage more just in case something happens with binning. Their deal to buy those excess chips got them a sweetheart deal they couldn't have gotten without ordering millions of units (they also couldn't have gotten it without contacts though).

Now they're big enough to make their own orders and even their own chip designs and it's inertia because changing requires a lot of money for new firmware and software changes. Changing would increase device cost for at least a could of cycles.

On the x86 front, they're simply never going to get that good of a deal with AMD or Intel.

I would strugle the same way on macbook, never used this platform. Pi4 is fairly nice desktop. I use it as a backup workstation while traveling.

Does anyone know how a Pi4 with 8gb ram would hold up compared to a six year old mid-lower tier laptop?

It's something I've been curious about for a while and really just waiting for the point where a RaspberryPi-type device is adequate for Facebook / Hackernews / Youtube, which is essentially what I use a laptop for at home.

So I have both the 4gb pi and the 2gb one. The 4gb pi does a pretty decent job at basic browsing, but Youtube doesn't really work. VLC videos with certain encodings and filesizes work, others don't. I can infer that the 8gb pi is better, but I would probably not use it as a daily driver.

The 4GB model can run Chromium and Firefox ESR fast enough for me to use Tweetdeck, access all manner of "work sites" (including O365 webmail), the Azure portal, and code a few things (but I am a heavy vim user and can live inside tmux).

I use mine as a thin client, and have been fiddling with an Elementary image for it: https://github.com/rcarmo/elementary-os-unofficial (mine currently doesn't install correctly, but should take a couple more days to fix).

YouTube is... passable. What really helps is booting from an SSD -- although my Acer Celeron is still faster.

I just got an 8GB one and it works well enough for YouTube and light browsing but I couldn’t use it as a dedicated machine. Certainly is more snappy than the older ones I have. Just visiting the YouTube home page seems to really be pushing it though.

What I am hearing from this is that there are good odds the Pi5 will be a suitable light-duty desktop replacement.

Pretty much, I think it just needs a slightly faster CPU to handle loading JavaScript heavy pages.

By then the Javascript-heavy pages will probably be even heavier. You'll then be waiting for the Raspberry Pi 6 to run them.

Even the 1 or 2GB models would be adequate for that.

I remember when people were trying to do day-to-day work on their smartphones, then the iPad came out and they started to work on those, which eventually led to the iPad Pro and Microsoft Surface Pro and now fully capable of doing day-to-day work on it.

Keeping pushing the boundaries!

With the slight difference that any of these boundaries pushers (never did) cost $75. Not now not then.

Tangentially, I permanently replaced my Raspberry Pi with an x86 Upboard and it is just so much nicer to use and not really that expensive, though there are some high end models

https://up-shop.org/

I didn't get what's wrong with H.264 since it present in every pi even on pi zero.

If you don’t add the right options to FFmpeg it can’t take advantage of the CPU acceleration, I believe.

Since people are so disappointed with ARM64 video/audio viewing/recording/editing applications, they should write their own and contribute to Linux ARM64 and stop complaining

RISC V on FPGA sucks, I wouldn't use it either

The other article on Apple switch to arm might help. Those software on mac are on arm. You have now some video editing software on ipad that works well. The question is which is the next winter, AppleArm or ...

If the author did all of this in one day as a OSX/Linux novice, hat's off! Took me a good bit of playing around to get fluid using Linux for the first time

I admire how knowledgeable Jeff is in different subject matters. Jeff is a major contributor in the ansible community and very helpful to everyone.

Hey Jeff! I've been using your VirtualBox Centos builds/images for years. It's nice to see the face behind the Box.

I Replaced My MacBook Pro with a Cat for a Day

I tried that too but my cat had trouble interfacing with the mouse.

(Sorry)

The only purpose I could see raspberry pi in, is as a development env where you can ssh into and do work as a pure Linux kernel.

If I was to use an arm desktop full time it would be microsoft surface pro x (although with its quirks) having much more support and apps

Also Apple is planning to move MacBook line to arm although time will tell whether that will work out or not. In the meanwhile we might need to stick to x86 architectures for a while

I feel the same pain. Sound is a problem in my x86_64 Linux. One of the sound cards doesn't work anymore, don't know what happened. But if I pass it through to a Windows virtual machine with virt-manager, it works!

So many problems for the desktop, that come almost day in day out that I'm considering trying Haiku OS for the desktop. Just need something that works.

I have the feeling that between graphics and sound processing there is just a dearth of material about how the underlying mechanisms that drive that portion of computing actually work. At least, I haven't really the magic words to represent "For God sake, what do I have to line up to make this stiff work" yet.

It's front and center of this decades computing goals for me. To that end, I've been looking into things like how X actually works, actually making use of graphics processing hardware, and the like. If anyone has some good reading, I'd love to know.

The author is right, none of these problems exist on macOS, and if you want the year of the Linux desktop to finally come, it will have to solve all of the issues highlighted. The commenters aren't going to be there to defend the true use-cases of "ARM Linux Desktop" to the end-user, so expect them to be completely turned off by this experience.

None of these problems exist on my XPS running Ubuntu, either. Of course when going to a 75$ not-desktop-grade machine from a $1500 Mac you'll find some compromises along the way. That comment doesn't make the slightest sense, frankly.

I remember saying in 2000 to someone that Linux cannot simultaneously have a reputation as "elite" and being for hackers and also have its Year of the Desktop.

Of course, we ask so much more of desktops now than when I was running a beta of NT 5, so I think all of the goalposts have moved (or perhaps a rising tide has lifted many boats). Still, whenever I try to set up a machine that is the equivalent of my "not very thinking hard, screwing around with my brain off" Windows setup, I keep coming across this friction, a drag to any momentum I develop.

I think the issues are multiple, complex, and fairly entrenched. It's a shame because I would like to be able to set up machines for friends that are familiar, easy to use, and so forth, but my occasional efforts have been stymied.

I thought this $120 tablet + keyboard looked interesting but wondering if 2GB of RAM is going to cut it?

https://store.pine64.org/?product=pinetab-10-1-linux-tablet-...

A fast SSD does wonders for making lower memory machines feel responsive. I do useful work on a 4GB machine running Win10. There is lag when web browsing, but it's easy to adjust to.

That said, it won't cut it if your applications actually do need more than 2GB at a time. And the Pine device doesn't list support for SATA or M.2 either, so you can't count on the SSD being a screamer.

I'm amazed that, given how long video editors have been around, there isn't something better than OpenShot or Kdenlive; I would have expected that someone would be working on the video equivalent of Gimp/Audacity/etc.

Did you try ShotCut?

Don't the Raspberry Pi 4 support 4kp60?

I think it does but only on 1 monitor.

Correct, you need to toggle a setting in the boot config, and your HDMI cable and monitor both have to support HDMI 2.0

great choice for those looking to waste time

I can't even get WiFi working on my Pi 4. I can only resolve IPv6, anything IPv4 fails. I suspect it's a router issue but I have no control over that, so I simply can't use the Pi.

With Windows practically giving licenses away, Apple coming with MacOS, cheap chromebooks coming with chromeOS, I really don’t get this “Linux on a desktop move”, especially when it is $75 device + $250 of accessories.

That said I love Pi, have it for home automation and media server, amazing piece of tech, NOT a desktop replacement and for the most part it’s not even aiming at that.

OS with decent and predictable support are not easy to find. Windows can change overnight after a big update. Most devices you mentioned are junk, since ssd is soldered on motherboard.

Where can I get a free Windows license for my Macbook?

Anecdotally, I've found you don't really need one if you're fine with a nag in the bottom right corner.

Surprisingly enough I've found nearly any Windows 7 or 8's sticker license will work for 10--find any old laptop/desktop with one and you'll have a "free" license.

Cool write up/experiment, and I can feel the pain with Linux and Sound issues. A few days ago I had a job interview and they used MS Teams. At first I was completly blown aways that there is a native linux app. For the first 5 minutes I tried to get sound input working but gave up. Luckily once you press the invite link, you can also choose to join via browser, and then sound input worked directly as expected.

>But, sadly, I don't think this year is the 'Year of the Linux desktop'. In general, I think 'Linux on the Desktop' for a mainstream audience is always going to be 20 years away, just like nuclear fusion.

Yep. I know there are people who do Linux on the Desktop, but they're people with a lot more tolerance for day-to-day pain than me. I had a job about a decade ago where I had a linux desktop machine as my day-to-day working environment and it was a miserable experience. There just doesn't seem to be the will to make things otherwise.

Linux on the desktop works pretty well in my experience. Desktops have wired networks, mainatream hardware, mouses, stay connected to the same display all the time, headphones are wired, and power management is nice to have.

Where it gets annoying is "linux on random laptop". Suddenly perfect power management is a must, there's an expectation of sleep instead of shutting down, networks are wireless, headphones snd keyboards and mice are bluetooth, displays change all the time, you have a touchpad to contend with, etc -- all of this is very driver dependent and manufacturers don't care about linux at all.

It's not that linux haven't gotten better - it had, but the problem also got a lot more difficult.

Linux Mint (on an old Inspiron 5530, currently chained to the ground) and the cheapest Ideapad (for travel) works for me. Perhaps there were one or two issues at the beginning? If there were I can't remember. I can keep identical installs on both which means stuff that worked at home will likely work on the road. Mint installation is so straightforward now that, personal data aside, I can consider install almost throwaway - it's just not a big step anymore.

As for the RPi I wish they'd make more effort for it to be a better kiosk or headless device - lack of built in safe shutdown makes me reach for arduino where possible. I don't anyone is going to use an RPi to replace their laptop or desktop anytime soon.

10 years ago, Ubuntu became the Linux on the Desktop for me. I do everything with it. Browse the net, watch movies, play games, develop software. Everything, and I couldn't be happier.

The Linux on the Desktop arrived a decade ago for me, so your assertion puzzles me deeply.

I'm not really sure why there is so much "ubuntu" love. Of the three distro's I run/try out regularly on desktop/laptop class hardware (opensuse/fedora & ubuntu) I regularly find ubuntu to be the inferior choice.

My personal "linux" laptops have been on various flavors of opensuse since the 11.x releases when I discovered for the first time, that linux was actually doing everything correctly (backlight dimming, standby/hibernate, wifi, sound, accelerated graphics, docking/undocking) out of the box. (I've been running linux in various forms since the 1990s).

Opensuse, is not been perfect by any means, I had to hack the bluetooth driver with the latest dell when I initially installed it, but within a year or so that got fixed too.

So, there really isn't any "ubuntu" magic, and I might go so far as to say if you want really good support on the latest hardware you should be running fedora. But in general all the major distros are working roughly the same at this point with one or the other working better on any given piece of hardware.

I'm not saying Ubuntu is the best choice. I used Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Ubuntu. First Kubuntu, then became disappointed with KDE so went to straight Ubuntu.

I'm not going to argue about distros. I works magically for me. It might not for you, and that's fine.

My point was: my year of Linux on the Desktop arrived 10 years ago.

Things have changed a lot. Over the last year the company I work for has transitioned a couple hundred developers from Windows desktops to Linux desktops and it has been surprisingly smooth. Much better than an experiment I ran myself a number of years prior.

I have seen a fair amount of successful transitions. My company develops open source software and our development team is on Linux/Mac. Works a treat. Sales/Marketing/etc - Windows mostly with some more adventurous users using Mac. Linux is still not there yet, for an end-user overall nice experience.

If you buy hardware designed by the manufacturer to work with linux then most things are just fine.

As a full time linux user, it pains me to say it but there will never be a "Year of the Linux desktop". Not now, not in 100 years. Linux is the weapon of choice for a very small audience and the proprietary giants are simply not interested in a niche market. Some people can get away with using a raspberry pi as a main computer(myself included, given that I only use a browser and vim for work). But again - that's just me. Many of my co-workers rely on heavy IDEs so that rules it out for them.

Default Linux desktop is painful. If you set things up properly and learn a thing or two it can be less painful than the alternatives. I much prefer my custom xmonad setup over mac and windows, which (literally and figuratively) painfully require more mouse interactions and setup that can't be easily captured in config files that I can check into version control.

> Default Linux desktop is painful. If you set things up properly and learn a thing or two it can be less painful

Which is precisely my point. Even default Windows isn't so painful.

There's also the problem of applications. Most of my dev toolkit is available cross-platform, but I do more than dev on my computers.

If you are using a computer as a professional tool why wouldn't you put in the effort to customize it? It's mostly a one-time cost and lasts a lifetime. It's like using a stock car as a race car.

Because it's not really a one-time cost. It's a cost for every computer that you sit down at. If you're only ever at one computer, that's great, but in practical terms, it's more likely that you'll have your home computer (possibly more than one), your work computer (possibly more than one) and your team mates' computers. And if everyone's computer is a little different in some subtle way, that's a big problem. If the default settings, on the other hand are good enough that few if any tweaks are necessary, that means that the experience of moving between machines is less painful.

A lot of strides have been made over the past decade. The ecosystem has had it's fair share of problems, but I've been using Linux as my daily driver for the past 5 years with no major complaints. I'm typing this on a Ubuntu 16.04 install and the only issue I frequently run into is bluetooth which I believe has since been fixed for 18.04 / 20.04.

Dunno.

Linux Mint have been my daily driver for over a year and I see much less issues with it then I had with Win8.

I play games in steam, draw stuff, I even have working VR (HTC Vive), everything works just fine or even with less problems then in win (like bluetooth devices, for example)

This. It's why I spend my entire day on windows even though all my targets are Linux.

I'm running linux desktops these days, but for ~15 years my linux development enviroment was windows+putty+exceed/xming. People would ask me why and for a long time I would close the lid on my laptop and reopen it, or point to my monitor layout.

A lot of that stuff works these days, but there have been plenty of times Ive had issues which burned a whole day fixing. In the latter cases, I've just been left wondering how people who can't fix their own kernel/X/systemd/whatever bugs manage.

Meh, I've gone from doing webdev work on a Linux desktop (Kubuntu) to doing general office work on Win10. The pain is real.

Mind you it's on a Microsoft computer, and with corp IT, but it's always broken and the idiosyncrasies are infuriating.

Gah I feel that. I have resisted corporate IT much to their dismay.

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