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Comment by Ijumfs | Hacker News Reader

The Pi 4 is a big revolution, fast enough to serve as a desktop computer for most office people, students, and so on. It's pretty impressive and more attention is being paid to it as a first-class computing platform as time goes on.

Our desktop monoculture has led to serious security problems and massive stagnation at least until recently. Even if you don't use a Pi you should be thankful that they exist.

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It should be and is decent, but when we tried we ran into numerous paper-cuts:

- Needed to set up NTP to set the clock, it was always wrong.

- It can't power down through software, so you have to shut down and then hit the power switch like it's 1990.

- Audio was a mess and had to spend hours researching how to write and edit a bunch of config files to make it predictable.

- The weird set up program means you need to do a lot of googling on how to fix issues in a non-standard to linux way. It mostly works however.

- Raspbian feels not quite "finished." Was much happier with Ubuntu Mate, as they fixed 99% of the paper cuts like audio already, but it doesn't support the 4 yet.

In short, it is a bit too cheap. I would have definitely spent another dollar to see these hardware issues fixed. Or dropped the CPU speed a hundred MHZ, whatever it takes.

In the end, a friend gave us a ten-year-old used iMac for free. I installed Ubuntu Mate on it and it had none of the above problems. It's even a touch faster.

A touch faster? The slowest 2010 iMac is the 21" with an i3-540 Dual core CPU, Geekbench 4 is 2211 single/4466 multi. The Pi 4 is around 970/2000, less than half the performance.

The Pi 4 has come a long way in speed since the lowly original Pi, but its still not even close to a 10 year old desktop PC (or iMac).

More people (even in 2010) used laptops than desktops, and the Pi is in line with the numbers from the cheaper MacBook Airs at the time (I still have one that runs... though it’s getting some weird green lines on the display).

But I can say that working on the 2010 MBA is not fun; one of my webcams doesn’t even work with it (choppy at 30p), zoom is... slow at best, and web browsing is a bit choppy even with ad blockers. Even then, it is a smoother overall experience with that hardware and macOS than when I was testing 64-bit Pi OS on the 8 GB Pi 4 a few weeks ago: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook...

Don't be so literal. ;-) Looked closer and it is a 7,1 from 2007. Core 2 duo 2.6ghz, decent HD, and Nvidia gfx.

None of those except the second one (and maybe the first one) are hardware issues. Raspbian is not great but nobody is forcing you to use it.

Just run Windows 10 for the Pi and call it a day. Linux for desktop is still a disaster and no surprise Windows 10 for the Pi actually works out of the box.

Linux for desktop has not been a disaster for a few years now. Windows for anything has been a disaster for a few years now.

Nope, Ubuntu Mate is very functional and respects the user. I won't use a disrespecting OS unless forced. Which I do, have a W10 vm for work.

Now Win 2k I might consider, however it is likely very insecure and newer apps don't support it.

I bought an old Lenovo tiny pc for about the same price as a pi4 with all perephials. Performance can hardly be compared.

The CPU is now (IMHO) the major sticking point for many of my own use cases. It would also be nice to have an easier / less cumbersome way to connect higher speed storage. (The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying.)

> The mess of cabling you get with an add-on USB 3.0 drive is annoying

I’m surprised there’s no Raspberry Pi case with a slot for a 2.5” drive and integrated USB 3.0 SATA controller.

there are, can even make your own. One quick example https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-Upgrated-Raspberry-2-5-In...

There are a few, and they're not too bad, but it's still something that would be neatly solved with an option of a PCIe slot or even onboard eMMC like on the compute module (assuming the eMMC or built-in NVMe was much faster than the one on CM3+ and below).

I've just bought a Pi4, 7" touchscreen and a case that takes the lot. I have converted the thing to boot and run off a USB3 stick and it runs rather faster than off the SD card. I'm not too bothered about trying to turn it into a NUC.

Nowadays I see a Pi as a kiosk style machine with extras. It is what it is. It is a fantastic jack of all trades. You get loads of GPIO of all sorts, bluetooth, wifi, ethernet, USB2 and 3, a quad core CPU and 2-8GB RAM. Two HDMI ports and a GPU. It's too much for jobs that you would deploy an ESP8266 or ESP32 and it's not enough for a full on desktop replacement.

I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage on one of these things. If your use case needs greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or I simply lack imagination.

I have a C-64 under the telly in the sitting room (it has a QSII joystick and a USB interface). I have a ZX81 with 3" of rather stiff Blutac holding the 16Kb RAM expansion steady and a keyboard on a ribbon. Sometimes I go back to school and type in definitions for 8x8 blocks and make them run around the screen. I do not own a Sinclair C5, that would be silly.

Mess of cabling: lol!

    I can't see a need for more than 16 or 32GB of storage 
    on one of these things. If your use case needs 
    greater storage then it probably needs more "box" or
    I simply lack imagination.

Generally yeah. One possible (slightly contrived) exception that comes to mind could be using it as "dumb" volatile storage like Redis/memcached/etc.

I say "dumb" because if you are leaning into any of Redis' more advanced stuff (sorted sets, pub/sub, whatever else they've thrown in lately) I suspect CPU would tend to become a bottleneck rather quickly once you've got > 8GB of data.

It's terrible that 2-8GB RAM is not enough for a full on desktop replacement. You could run Windows 95 in 4 MB. Was that not a desktop? The original Mac was just 128 KB.

Suppose it was all for graphics. Scaling up for modern color depth and screen size, we should need about 400 MB for the Windows 95 level of efficiency, or about 64 MB for Mac level of efficiency. That's a huge overestimate because RAM is not all consumed by graphics.

In other words, modern software can't run a desktop properly without even 10 to 100 times as much RAM as it ought to need.

My desktop with KDE Plasma 5 consumes somewhere in the ballpark of 500 MB RAM initially on startup.

RAM consumption by Konsole, tmux, and Neovim (30+ loaded buffers) combined is negligible to say the least.

RAM consumption by my browser with 10+ windows and 100+ tabs loaded easily exceeds 4+ GB even when exclusively visiting supposedly "lightweight" text based sites (ie documentation).

Going beyond RAM, playing a video on YouTube occupies a small but noticeable fraction of total CPU time. A single script heavy ad laden site sometimes manages to occupy a problematically large fraction of all available cores. Depending on the site, Dark Reader might slow this all to a crawl for 10+ seconds as the bloated page gradually loads (I'm looking at you, Amazon).

The problem isn't modern desktop environments.

A file server is a pretty basic task, and zfs is a pretty good choice of fs for a file server, and zfs wants all the ram you can scrape up.

But still there may not be many such examples so your point is still valid.

I use a 3b+ for a 3d printer and that means, octoprint, klipper, octolapse, live streaming from a webcam while printing, a web server and web ui with various plugins, a slicer (I don't slice on the pi, but it's there and I could) and for all that the 3b+ is hardly scratched while running full out. It's a 4g model that is always using only couple hundred meg if you don't count disk cache. This is exactly consistent with your supposition.

NVME hanging off the USB bus would be nicer and more compact.

At that point you probably want a NUC style computer like the Lenovo M75q. Up to 4 core 8 thread, 32GB+ RAM (two slots), AMD graphics and an M.2 slot.

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe...

Also noteworthy is the upcoming ASUS PN 50 with the new Ryzen Renoir CPUs with up to 8 cores and 64GB RAM.

When this will be available in Europe I’ll get that to replace my MacBook for a developer machine.

https://liliputing.com/2020/06/asus-pn50-is-a-mini-pc-with-u...

The 8 core 16 thread version looks very promising. Wonder what the prices will be?

x64 doesnt excite me as much as Arm does at the moment, for power draw.

The DeskMini series has two M.2 slots AND two 2.5” slots in a tiny enclosure. Here’s mine:

Noctua NH-L9A-AM4, 37mm Premium Low-profile CPU Cooler for AMD AM4 (Brown) £36.17 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NH-L9A-AM4-Premium-Low-profi...

ASRock USB 2.0 Header to 2 x USB 2.0 Cable for DeskMini Series Chassis £10.93 Incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Cable-Deskmini-Mini-Stx-Chas...

AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Processor (4C/8T, 6MB cache, 4.2GHz Max Boost) with Radeon™ RX Vega 11 Graphics £139.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SXNDKNM/?tag=pcp0f-21

Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-1TB) £109.99 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGF54XR/?tag=pcp0f-21&th=1

ASRock DeskMini A300 Mini PC Barebone for Socket AM4 £146.94 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07P9GL1LN/?tag=pcp0f-21

ASRock Wi-Fi Kit for DeskMini Series Chassis, includes 2 x Antennas £29.42 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Wi-Fi-DeskMini-Chassis-Anten...

2 x ADATA AD4S2666316G19-S 16GB DDR4 2666 MHz Memory Module - Memory Modules (16GB, 1x 16GB, DDR4, 2666MHz, 260-pin SO-DIMM) 2 x £73.12 incl. VAT https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-AD4S2666316G19-S-16GB-Memory-...

Price a few months ago - £619.68

Note that you don’t need the noctua fan but the provided fan that comes with the case is a bit whiny.

It's also possible to fit the fan included with the 3400G into the deskmini with slight modification (removing the plastic shroud from the top, it's just clipped on).

For a better fit I also had to cut off two plastic fingers that were left after taking the shroud off. Does not affect the functionality in any way and works well to this day.

Ooh, that does sound good.

DeskMini A300's dimensions: 155 x 155 x 80 mm

From the specs: https://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/DeskMini%20A300%20Series/i...

being 3-4× the size, weight, price and power consumption, it really doesn't compare. I'm sure pi4 SATA/NVMe enclosures/hats exist

I find the NUC's way overpriced unless you really need a high end CPU. I love my H2s[0]- good mix of cpu, RAM, storage (m2 + sata), and low power usage. Plus, they run standard x86_64 Linux/windows. Tricked out with 16G RAM, and a couple of cheap SSDs mine came in at $250.

[0]https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus/

How fast does that setup run in practice? I have an odroid hc2 (which is a wholy different chipset than the h2plus, I know), and that's about as pokey as my pi4.

I haven't benchmarked them - the h2plus is celeron quad core at 2.3Ghz, with on-board Intel graphics.

I find them fine for light interactive use, and running network services for the home network. Also gradually moving my lab machines over to them.

None of this is particularly CPU intensive, but does benefit from being x86 compatible. Also having M2 NVME + 2xSata on-board is nice :-)

That's a sick machine, to bad it's not running Intel Nics otherwise I'd consider it for firewall/NAT-uses.

I really like them - here are some photos of putting it all together: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23744973

Used SFF PC (like Haswell i5) is cheap, powerful for this context, and also nice for power consumption.

I tried to use the pi 4 as a nextcloud server and found it to be unbearably slow. Not sure what caused it but I suspect the sd card speed.

I also had a recent install that was unbearably slow. It turns out that the SD card was corrupted. Raspberry Pi OS comes with a SD card checking utility you can use to check. Replacing it with a new class 10 card made it fast again.

You can boot from USB now. No need for SD.

You should also go for at least Application Performance Class 1.

browsing media is still unusably slow on usb3 hdd as well. once it starts generating previews, youre done. pre-generating doesnt help much

been using it for photo sync only, works fine enough as long as youre not using the web interface

Did you try it using a UASP USB3 HDD though?

That was my issue. Images would take 3-10 seconds to show in the UI. Once I moved to a ryzen 5 server I was seeing everything load like it was local.

For my money they've pushed a fraction too hard on the CPU power. One of the best things for me about the 3 is that you don't need to worry about cooling the way you do with the 4. I get why, there's a huge demand for the 4 to be able to handle proper desktop applications, but I'd love to see a version that has the thermal characteristics of the 3 with the IO updates of the 4.

I'd actually like a new version of the Compute Module with the PCI-e lanes exposed (the more the better). That would be a real game changer for NAS systems.

Or, for both CM and the full RPi, a docking header and a corresponding tiny module for a real-time clock module if not outright embed one. It's 2020 ffs.

It's the price of that ancient 28nm manufacturing.

> The Pi 4 is a big revolution, fast enough to serve as a desktop computer for most office people, students, and so on.

Even the Pi 3 was already good enough for most of those use cases. The main exception being browsing modern bloated websites.

The Cortex-A53 is really weak. I wouldn't want to run an office suite on that either. Oh, and the Pi 3 was VERY limited by RAM.

"most office people, students, and so on" pretty much always do browse lots of modern websites, at the same time as running an office suite, audio player, and more stuff.

The A72 is really the "minimum viable CPU core" for desktop usage. Anything with less single-core performance is absolute hell and suffering.

The CM 3+ (which is clocked at 1.2 GHz but is same in other ways to the Pi B 3+ which is 1.4 GHz) is less than half as fast as the Pi 4 in most CPU tasks: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-cluster-...

Not true. I barely notice any difference between my Orange Pi 3 (4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz) and my Ivy Bridge workstation, when browsing the web, and things like that.

I don't run a heavy weight desktop though.

The only noticeable thing is some increased latency (mainly due to storage speed limited to 20MiB/s read speeds), but animations and scrolling and basic stuff like that are pretty much smooth. I could easily run the system from USB attached SSD (which can achieve 15-20x the speeds of the SD card), and that would massively improve app startup speeds too.

Also video playback sucks, but that's mainly due to software support, not a hardware issue. It's a chip meant for TV boxes after all.

I wouldn't use it to compile programs, but office work? I can imagine that easily.

> The main exception being browsing modern bloated websites.

So, the most common use case for a desktop computer?

The current version of raspian comes with ublock origin preinstalled in chromium.

Both of these choices surprised me.

Why does the choice of uBlock origin surprise you?

I wasn't expecting an adblocker installed by default.

Makes sense though, for browsing performance.

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