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Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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