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Comment by SloopJon | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...).

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).

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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