Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharing my theme, config and some
raymii.org
raymii.org
It was fun to tinker, but it's questionable if I learnt anything useful other then how to get hobby DEs working on ancient hardware. I guess tangentially I gained an intermediate knowledge of Linux command line tools and some networking concepts.
PuppyLinux [0] ended up being my choice for easy defaults after DSL [1] stagnated. I'm glad to see it's still going and has developed its own ecosystem. Even after I could buy reasonable computers, for a while I took some pride in squeezing performance out of budget computers but ultimately, now that I need to be productive to get paid, it's nice to have computers that "just work" with modern software.
[0] https://puppylinux.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux
It's a skill I like to call a "video game mentality" that I think was probably influential in the rise of technology: video games gave players the ability to push buttons and experiment in all kinds of ways with a technological system but in a very low stakes environment.
I don't think I would have been nearly as comfortable poking around and tweaking system variables in my first computers running Windows 3.X and 95 if I didn't have years of experience poking around in other pixel-based environments in the form of videogames. I would break things, panic, realize that whatever it was, it was fixable, go through trial and error, learn to find other people and resources to help, fix the problem, and do it all over again at some point.
My last job was product director for a major CI/CD platform, so there’s a pretty clear breadcrumb trail all the way back to tinkering with Linux on old hardware to now.
The Linux command line and scripting was part of it, but the real deeper lesson was that computers are understandable and if you are persistent you can fix or improve nearly anything, or assemble something new and useful by building on what’s available to you.
I had one of those original EeePC's years ago, 900 mhz celeron in like 2008, 800x480 screen, just woefully out of date. Ended up running Fluxbox just because of ram usage. With an actual WM it couldn't stream The Daily Show smoothly. I really do love playing with low spec systems.
I did similar things, and on one hand I feel it’s ok that it’s not all “useful” - it was a hobby after all, but on the other hand I do feel it had benefits - you learned patience, creative thinking, problem solving, and working on those projects for a long stretch of time almost has a meditative effect I felt. I’m sorry that a lot of modern kids probably don’t get to experience this as much as everything is pre-packaged, system-on-a-chip, non-fixable etc. (And people are more careful of how they dispose of computers due to privacy).
Not sure how it is anymore, but Puppy Linux circa 2008 was like the GeoCities of operating systems, glorious in its own unpolished way. Vector Linux, too, which I believe was Puppy's ancestor.
That was me well into my 20s :) Win2k broke, and I was broke, so the only option was to install linux.
It paved the way for me to get into programming, not so much shell scripts, but just the powerful idea that computer systems were malleable things you could change - something not really obvious for those of us who cut our teeth on MS Windows.
Yeah I never understood people who work with computers all day economizing on their computers. Even from scalpers you’ll pay ~$6500 for top of the line parts and peripherals, which is about the cost of a high school student’s violin.
At one of my first jobs, when my boss got annoyed by some software being slow, je always said that developers should get the fastest hardware available, but as soon as they start testing or using their own software, the machine needs to magically turn into a 386 with your home directory on an NFS share. Granted, that was 20 years ago so 386 didn't sound as hilarious as it does now, but it was still a little extreme. But that idea stuck with me, and to this day I do test software on slow machines every now and then, looking for obvious performance left on the table.
1. In many countries $6500 is enough to start a business. I'd rather do that than pay for an overpriced piece of aluminum with a piece of fruit etched on one of the sides. What if I'm not the business type? That's fine. It's still probably better to save that money.
2. Modern computing is turning into a dumpster fire. It will be pretty soon that the Intel platform will work in the same way as the above-mentioned fruitty platform and you won't be able to run whatever software you want on it. While I agree OP is probably making his life extra miserable [1], I admire people like him, since their efforts will give us the next free/fun computing platform.
[1] I too run a Raspberry Pi at home, but I've long given up on turning it into a desktop machine. There is an easier way to run modern software on cheap hardware with a fraction of the hassle.
The GNOME Foundation's supposed rationale for removing basic functionality from its desktop is to help inexperienced users, and international users. However, those are precisely the same users who are more likely to have a shortage of computing resources. GTK's bloat is really indefensible.
That's my setup because it has fewer moving parts and lower latency, as there are only a handful of processes running and no compositor.
I might be mistaken here, but it seems to me that the international users who want a simple experience are already well served by smartphones (android or otherwise).
The international users who are going to install linux on a laptop are the tinkerers and fiddlers and the self motivated learners who aren't going to be motivated by a dumbed down, inaccessible interface.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2536558/red-hat-sees-n...
smartphones have small screens, and terrible keyboards.
almost no one will creatw anything except simple photography and tweets on a phone.
my phone can't even provide capital letters reliably.
self motivated learners aren't stopped by a simple UI; they can use terminal and web apps.
Now having GNOME with its Javascript based shell and extensions, making every click take a couple of seconds longer and me wondering what it is doing, no thanks.
I don't understand why you have to wonder what it's doing, the javascript is all self-contained and hosted locally. It's not using npm or anything like that. And the extensions are pretty much the same as any other app you use that supports plugins.
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3410651
"GNOME Shell Performance Improvements in Ubuntu 20.04"
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/gnome-shell-performance-impro...
"Boosting the Real Time Performance of Gnome Shell 3.34 in Ubuntu 19.10"
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-perfor...
When I complain about GNOME performance, I am not making it up, learn that and bye.
Thing is, not everyone is a die hard fan. Developers on Gnome, by definition, are, but outside of that, customers are going to go with what works. And that's not Gnome. Customer's don't care that the UI slowness in version 1 was caused by X, and UI slowness in version 2 was caused by Y. There was UI slowness, which made it unusable, and, well, now they're using XFCE or OS X or Windows. It doesn't matter that there was a bug and it was fixed a year ago. The problem is that there was a bug a year ago, and that particular customer is gone and can't be recaptured - they've got a solution that works and they're not looking to switch to a different one. Especially one that has a history of problems.
That's not to say GNOME _isn't_ resource intensive -- it is, especially when compared to desktop environments that were either written to be lightweight or written 30 years ago -- that just isn't the best way to measure it.
That's why I said apples to oranges initially, but you're right, I could have clarified that part.
Also, your characterization of GNOME's rationale is totally wrong. The goal was never to make a desktop with no features, it was more to make a desktop that is streamlined towards certain functionality. If that's not for you, then use a desktop that's more streamlined towards what you want. There's plenty to choose from. What is the real problem?
Edit: I also want to address another common misconception that I see -- the GNOME Foundation does not direct development in a top down fashion and does not impose any rationale on the project. If some feature was removed, it was probably because an individual volunteer working on it decided that it wasn't worth spending time on that anymore, possibly because the need was better filled by a different project.
Useful links: 1. https://ometer.com/preferences.html, the subset of Mr. P's original essay that the original contains a link to. 2. https://www.derstandard.at/story/1313024283546/gnome-designe..., an interview with Jon McCann.
For the record: I care.
Roughly, I'd characterize it like the following: I believe that the best way for Linux to gain ground is to be a serious, perhaps even a little boring, but definitely "grown-up" desktop. Simplicity is very important, but tt should lean toward configurability and techniness.
What it should NOT do is what GNOME is trying to do, which is trying to streamline and appeal to everyone. This approach is like trying to beat Apple at their own game, which is dumb -- given that beating Microsoft at their own game is well within our reach. Heck, look at Windows 11, we're like a third of the way there already.
To put it another way: maybe some specific mode of "Linux gaining ground on desktops" with "configurability and techniness" is your goal, but people working on any given desktop (including GNOME) may not share that goal in the same way you do, and it doesn't make any sense to expect them to.
To elaborate a bit about why I'm saying this; For quite some time, onboarding people to Linux was pretty easy. "Just use Ubuntu" was a really good answer. And then Unity came along, with a) bloat and b) this new paradigm that was ostensibly as simple as a Mac, but different enough that people wouldn't recognize it. And this was a terrible direction for Ubuntu to go, especially since XP was on its way out.
And now, when people ask me, hey, how do I get started with Linux, and they've heard of Ubuntu, I can't just say "Yeah, go for it." I have to launch into a thing and name 2 or 3 different distros, primarily due to the weirdness of GNOME. I appreciate freedom and choice, but I'm also quite free to say, I believe the following: I really wish the GNOME people would more-or-less give up, because they have mindshare not off of the quality of their current interface, but because of the momentum of their old one plus Ubuntu. I believe that (much like Windows, frankly) if they actually had to compete in this space on the merits, they'd lose out.
KDE (and LXDE and others) are doing a better job of making a predictable useful interface.
But anyway it sounds like you just fixed that by using a different distro, you can even just suggest the KDE or LXDE spins of Ubuntu. Those still exist, and it's not hard to use them. If you're already using them then it's very hard for me to see what your actual complaint is or what you're trying to discourage. It's true you're free to express what you want, but please consider that what you're expressing may not be something that was done with having the full information. I've noticed there is a lot of confusion about what GNOME is and a lot of people seem to mix it up and equate it with Ubuntu or Red Hat or something, which is understandable, but it's not true. I'm only here to explain why.
And just to make it painfully clear: it is already hard enough to maintain open source and fix all the issues and improve the quality of the current interfaces, without people constantly demanding that open source maintainers give up and stop fixing bugs. If you want to get things fixed, you really don't need to do this.
Thus, I'm commenting as a fan/user/potential customer, who might find this useful in some way. Or not. Sports fans can talk about their team or the state of the game or what they like and don't like. That's what I'm doing. I'm not "demanding," and if anything, I'm arguing for less work. By the GNOME people, because their thing is a waste of time. Go work on the better things :)
This is incorrect. GNOME users would not consider it a waste of time, just like KDE users would not consider it a waste of time for someone to do work on KDE, or Mac users would not consider it a waste of time to work on macOS, etc. Please consider that your suggestion can be considered rude, you are simply not the target audience.
In general, open source doesn't work like this. These are volunteers, nobody can really tell them to go work on something else, because they work on what they feel like, which may or may not be seeking the approval of people like you. If you want to find another project that seeks your approval, that's great, go do that, let us know about it later and maybe I'll even try it out. If your goal is to harass open source developers until they quit open source, then please stop doing that, that would be making it worse for everyone.
There are "moneyed" business interests who have a lot at stake at their team winning mindshare and profits. Now, I have no problem with businesses being businesses generally. But part of their "product" is these interfaces. And so again, what I would suggest is that pushing GNOME type interfaces is, long term, a bad strategy that is likely to continue the trend of "Linux" being a second class citizen, by wasting energy toward the impossible goal of beating MacOS at their own game.
Conversely, pushing more configurable and slightly more techy KDE-like interfaces I think has stronger likelihood of making "on the tech margin" people more excited and interested in Linux, and ends up helping more people overall.
Now, I could be wrong about this -- but, while I definitely agree with "no one should to demand what open source developers do, especially if they're not being compensated" -- it's equally as bad (if not worse) to suggest "let's not offer big-picture criticism of trends in open source software that affects a lot of people."
I adhere to the idea that you should never be rude unless you feel there is something at stake that makes being rude worth it, and I think "trying to gain ground on the Linux Desktop" a thing that affects LOTS of people outside of the developers, is.
They surely where born that way, GNOME only exists due to the original Qt license.
Then Gtk+ was always the go to framework for C devs, while KDE was embraced by C++ community on GNU/Linux.
Murray did a very good job for the C++ refugees on GNOME/Gtk, but that has always been a minority versus being on KDE land.
Also I really wouldn't say that C and C++ are equivalent to political parties, that's like saying the same thing about coke and pepsi.
You haven't seen any drama, really?
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercia...
C vs C++ flame wars have been a thing since C++ was born at AT&T.
Since you aren't following up the news,
"CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory “Stop Teaching C"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk
"We stopped teaching C"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZUTJ2UNXxI
You can find similar stuff from C side, specially if you back in time to GNOME mailing lists, Usenet archives from comp.lang,languagex
As for your posts about C, I can give a personal anecdote: I would agree with those sentiments, C has a lot of really bad problems as a language. But yet, I still write it a lot more often than C++. So It's not as simple as you're making it out to be. Also I checked some of those slides and I wouldn't describe anything there as a "flame war."
>Everything that implies taking sides is politics, no matter what.
If you really want to look at things that way, you could, but this seems to not be strictly true. Just because there is taking sides does not mean there has to be fighting or politics.
On GNOME the documentation seems to have stagnated, then we had Anjuta, now GNOME Builder (which tries to be XCode like), a UI design tool that is being re-written from scratch, the various frameworks don't seem to compose, and then each binding does their own stuff, only adapts a couple of Gtk tutorial samples to their own language.
Naturally being GNU/Linux, everything that falls out of the UI only has POSIX or GNU/Linux specific C APIs to refer back to, yet another experience completely devoid of how things work on macOS (there is no Foundation, Accelerate, Core...).
I find this statement humorous because I've said much the same thing about Linux Desktop GUIs in general. "It's like they were made by someone who's only ever had a GUI described to them in an email". Compared to a system like the original Macintosh or RiscOS that thought hard about how to abstract things for a graphical display and a mouse, or even Windows that just copied as much of that as they could get away with, it's really quite terrible.
This is a vice, not a justification.
> “ The goal was never to make a desktop with no features”
Wow, your first paragraph you accuse people of lying at worst, or capriciously taking a position that doesn’t matter to them at best. It gets better in paragraph number two where you misquote GP and go boxing with that strawman.
So to address your first paragraph, I’d say people here care a lot, and the bashing they do is not out of a place of tribalism, but out of a place of constructive criticism. Most of us here would LOVE to see improvement in $ArchEnemySoftware, and the failures strike deep because this stuff means so much to us. A mixture of disappointment with the status quo, and/or poor judgement calls with design or execution, rather than knocking a bit of tech that doesn’t appeal to us.
As for the second paragraph, GP didn’t say “no features” in reference to GNOME, but decried the basic features that were removed, thereby rendering the software less useful to them.
I’d take a brighter outlook on discussions like these, if the points land on the right ears, perhaps positive change might happen in GNOME. We can hope anyway.
I also didn't see any constructive criticism, if you have any specific suggestions for positive change you'd like to make, then please make them. I'm all ears. But for the record, if you'd like to get involved in development, places like HN and reddit are generally not a good place to do it. The people who are most likely to listen to requests don't visit here.
Also, no hostility here. I find these discussions illuminating.
As for Reddit and HN, these places are excellent places for such commentary. Often times the maintainers of different packages heed complaints leveled here and change their ways. That’s a win for everyone if the change is a positive one.
I have not said that, I just asked you for your specific criticisms.
You’ve made that abundantly clear in this thread.
That's not correct, as a show of good faith I've explicitly asked for specific details on what the complaint is. I can't help you if you don't provide those details. If it seems I haven't done that, I apologize, that was not my intention. I'll try to be clearer next time. Let me know if there's anything specific you want me to clear up.
Perhaps you should keep those ideas to yourself and only concern yourself with your own level of contribution to the topic at hand. I don’t need you to mind my comments.
What do you find disappointing? I guess that’s what I’m driving at. When somebody knocks MacOS, and it’s a valid point, I hope somebody from Apple is reading! Then maybe it gets fixed. So why would that arrangement disappoint you?
I'm just relaying what other people have told me, these type of forums are full of uninformed comments, and are not a good place to solicit feedback. You could hope that maybe an Apple engineer would read it but they probably won't. You would have better luck sending them feedback through their official channels, where you know they will read it. If you're giving feedback to a YC startup then this would be a good place, but otherwise not so much.
Hacker News has solid representation from Big Tech, FOSS projects, and Academia. What data do you have to back up that this is a bad place to air grievances with software?
Whenever anyone mentions Amazon, my ears perk up. If it is within my power to correct, I take action. So what data do you have to support the assertion that HN comments are uninformed, and that this is only a good forum for YC startups?
I've seen plenty of complaints about Amazon here go unanswered. Amazon is a pretty big company, I'm guessing you don't know everything about it and may not be the right person to ask about many things. If I had a question, I'd definitely ask you if it was something you were an expert in, but I don't know what that is because you didn't say.
Obviously Amazon has some huge issues to overcome, both culturally and policy wise. If you keep bringing issues up, I’ll do my best to get them in front of the right folks.
It is possible to use the modern web if you keep the number of tabs low and switch heavier sites like gmail to the html mode. An ad blocker is needed and Youtube is watchable if you use the h264ify extension so it uses the hardware decoder and avoids modern video compression codecs.
I could even run libreoffice with Portuguese orthographic and grammatical checkers. It is slow, you can't run other tasks simultaneously but it works.
Want to watch movies? If it is 1080p or smaller encoded with h264 it is totally doable. Even streaming in 720p is doable. You won't be able to easily watch netflix though.
So, yes a 2GB Pi 2 is good enough for light browsing, light text editing, listening to mp3, watching movies and compiling software from early 2000's.
Things you can't comfortably do with it:
- Meetings: encoding and decoding with any codec that is not supported by the hardware is just too slow to be usable.
- Video editing: same as above. Also not enough RAM.
- Compiling large code bases: libreoffice and mozilla will probably fail on anything with less than 8Gb RAM. I could compile OpenCV on it, but it took hours.
- Keep many tabs open: you can if the sites are wikipedia-like. Anything more complex and the system starts swapping. Magic Sysrq-f is your friend in such situations.
- Modern IDE's: no way. Try gnu-nano or emacs/vi. Want to develop GUI apps? Use Lazarus-ide. Anjuta+Glade probably work stably with recent Gtk+3.x versions.
- Games: at the time I used it, the driver didn't support desktop OpenGL. Emulators for old consoles ran great, emulation station ran great, it is possible to run Quake but that is it.For games, I was super pleasantly surprised to rediscover old open source games that I had completely forgot and actually love: frozen bubbles, neverball and monsterz :)
What makes it a bit harder is that some software that ran on a SparcStation was carefully tailored to that machine while Chromium is not actually designed specifically for a raspi2... But you can go by with it. This thread gives some hints that I didn't try at the time like changing the cpu governor or using zswap. I didn't even overclocked it out of fear to reduce its lifespan.
But you of course, you're limited by what you can do and how you do it. I even began contributing to gnu-nano because I needed some features that weren't available on it and never got used to emacs/vim, but that is another story.
I remember in earlier KDE5 version you could suspend activities (in the KDE world this is sorta similar to a desktop - or a group of running applications). This would free up a lot of resources and could mean you can have a lot of applications "open" at once, but they're all in a frozen state. At some point this features was removed. I'm guessing it didn't play nice with a lot of applications. But I haven't been able to find anything equivalent.
You can sorta accomplish something similar by going into the task managed and suspending a task, but it's not ergonomic. Maybe someone has a good alternative?
For entertainment it was good enough for old games and h264 1080p movies.
The Pi 4 is a serious device. 1GbE, USB 3.0. It demolishes the previous Pi devices across the board in performance. I think this is where people get confused by others using the Pi4 as a NAS or server or whatever. There is this misunderstanding of just how equipped the Pi is today.
> Video editing: same as above. Also not enough RAM.
I wouldn't even do this on my Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM. Anything less than a workstation with gobs of RAM is just asking for a headache. Unless you're just chopping together the random video for the family once a year.
So I really don't get where you're coming from.
Nowadays I use an ESP8266 for most things, but it'd be nice to have a small, reliable Linux machine for things like file servers at my parents' house.
I ran a Raspberry Pi 3 as a desktop for a little while, and I believe I ran into the same problem. In most of my Linux installations, I format the drives without swap. I've never had a problem with it. But, I didn't know how to disable swap on the pi3.
The python demo games that come pre-installed are quite fun. The list includes snake, 15-slide puzzle, and fun flood it clones
I got some MSDOS games running well on dosbox, but you'll probably have to compile it from source to enable dynarec if you need more performance.
Id love to see a browser extension that disables JavaScript after its consumed a set number of cycles.
A page wants to asynchronously load a sidebar, great. A page wants to continuously resize and repaint an affixed element? Nope. You’re cut off.
I guess what I'm looking for is a "allow everything" container setup without having to enable/disable plugins or fiddle with white/blacklists.
Why does my machine, when the lid is closed with 1 browser tab open, need to spin the fans at full blast? It's a no from me.
- terminal (shell, editor)
- web browser (email client, file viewer, etc.)
- clock
With these, I only need a bare minimum window manager (fvwm2 in my case). In my view, KDE/GNOME are made not to scare away beginners and there isn't much productivity gain in using these environments. Once you're used to using Unix/Linux, you can graduate them and start using a more lean setup (while you don't have to, of course). One thing I can see might be handy is the System Settings / Control Panels apps. Other than that (and inertia), what are the reasons that people stick to these environments?
Maybe we don't have to be frozen in time and rather use modern tooling?
But yeah, gnome etc is overkill if `sudo vim etc/blah` doesn't scare you and you only speak english.
My gf does freak out editing networks and such and also needs her thai IME to just work so she runs gnome.
I also love Gnome. For me this is the best, not in your way, desktop environment ever done. For me however :)
Yeah, everyone who just develops in C and/or web thinks like this. It's one of the primary reasons nobody aside from them uses Linux Desktop.
- A noticeably laggy screen update when running urxvt. Any action which caused large amounts of text to scroll on the screen (e.g. a file listing or paging through a man page) would cause a bit of a visual stutter. I was running with with XFT fonts enabled, so maybe that was a contributing factor. Web page scrolling also seemed to lag a bit too if I recall correctly.
- Lack of gamma support for blue light filters such as redshift or f.lux
I'm crossing my fingers there are improvements to these areas in the future.
I've been using them for light to moderate desktop use for years now. The important things in desktopping a Pi, as far as I'm concerned:
- Fix the storage. The SD card is fine for a toy. It will not withstand actual daily use, either in "delivering sane performance" or "handling a lot of random writes without dying in a year." Get a USB to SSD adapter and a cheap 32GB or 64GB SSD from eBay - doesn't have to be fast, doesn't have to be new. It's radically better than an SD card in any use case that resembles desktop use. You can either boot straight from USB, or, to improve compatibility with weird USB to SSD adapters, boot from the SD card, mount root from the SSD, and use the SD card for swap or something (see below).
- Enable zswap if you're not on a 4GB or 8GB Pi4. It should be a module included in the Pi kernel now (I had to argue for a while to get it included). This is not zram - this is zswap. There's a huge difference. It's a compressed swap system that can flush out old or poorly compressible pages to the actual swapfile - which, since you're now fronting it with a compressed swap region in RAM, can be over on the SD card. The bulk of the stuff written to it will never be used again, unless you're just massively overcommitting RAM, at which point nothing really will help. I think around the 5.x kernels, z3fold starts working, though I've not seen a real practical difference between z3fold (up to 3 compressed pages per page of RAM) and zbud (only two compressed pages), as long as same filled pages are enabled - that will crunch a page of 0s down into a "Got it, all 0s, done!" note and not bother wasting space compressing it.
- Set the governor to performance. 'sudo cpufreq-set -g performance' The stock governor is really bad about ramping up, and leads to lag in typing, especially if you're using the atrocities that are modern "desktop" apps (Electron). Eventually, the system will spin up and do something useful, but you improve the performance and responsiveness rather substantially by just pinning the cores to their fastest speed and letting them stay there. I'm sure there's some measurable power difference doing this if you're concerned about the absolute lowest power, but it's not substantial, and "race to idle" solves a lot. If you're using a Pi as a desktop, try it - you'll like the change.
- Use adblockers. It's amazing how much CPU time the internet spends on stuff that is advertising, tracking, and generally evil. Most websites behave a lot better once you remove that garbage.
Otherwise... once you've done that, they're actually quite capable little systems! The Pi4 with 4GB or 8GB is the best option right now, and for most people I'm not sure the 8GB really gains you much - I have one, use it fairly heavily, and rarely see any RAM pressure past about 4GB. But it does make up for some slow disk.
I've written about some of this more extensively over on my blog over the years, if anyone wants more details - link is in my profile.
The jump from USB2 to USB3, either with or without UAS (it's nice, but doesn't lead to a huge jump in benchmarks) gets you a ton of disk performance, and my gut feeling is that while you could certainly measure the performance delta from USB3 to NVMe, it wouldn't lead to a practical increase in speed for typical desktop use. Going from glacial SD cards even to USB2 SSDs is a huge jump, but USB3 to NVMe seems like it would be going from "Fast enough that it's no longer a bottleneck" to "Even faster."
Though for reasons I don't understand fully, all the ARM boards I've tested have very poor USB3 performance compared to Intel. Same SSD, same USB adapter, and the Intel systems absolutely crush the ARM systems (Pi4 and Jetson Nano) in small sector IO performance.
The main problem with NVMe is that the various carriers that support it aren't cheap, and often (at least in the past 6-8 months) aren't really available. You can get a USB3 adapter and used SSD for $30, reliably, any time you want.
In the article : Firefox uses 900Mb! How did we get to the point that a browser needs 900Mb???
At that point there is a change in the ergonomics and location of coding / most desktop work.
With a Oculus Quest 2 - which has the highest resolution of the affordable VR headsets - it's still a little too grainy for prolonged coding sessions. But I think they'll get there in 1-2 generations.
Browsing the web in 2021, on the other hand, requires Watts.
> Using noscript to disable javascript in Firefox has also helped tremendously
It’s this kind of thing that made me switch to a Lenovo M93p for my desktop. It’s a great form factor with perfect Linux hardware support. You can also feel good about recycling someone else’s unwanted hardware.
I really wanted the pi to work out but it just couldn’t handle the JS heavy stuff I use in the day job (webmail, task-tracking, information management / CRM.)
I'm not sure whether it was the best choice or not, but we figured we'd fall back to a regular pc if we needed to, and so far we haven't been bothered enough to do that.
I know the problem is mine from not having discipline and not my modern desktop's fault for being able to run games, but still, I almost want a separate PC for this.
I’m actually running it from a Class 10 SD Card (external SSDs require unwieldy cases for the place it needs to slot in), and speed is fine for Firefox and VS Code use.
Neither supports wayland though
Computers are way cheaper if you know Linux.
C++ development (in CLion) is quite doable, although I prefer plain old vim on this machine due to CLion being quite laggy.
I don't think people selling it as a daily driver are doing it a favour though. It isn't meant as such and selling it as such is a disservice to the wider *nix universe.
(and yes I understand that rasp as daily driver in rural africa is literally the projects original goal. that's different though from silicon valley crew attempting to daily drive a rasp though)