Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

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I used a Pi 2 as a desktop from 2017 to the end of 2019. Apart from using window maker, I didn't made many changes to use it as a desktop. Also, since it is an under powered machine by today standards, using it as a desktop gave me the feeling of a 90's workstation. I even compiled the latest available GTk 1.x version and xmms for a better retro feel.

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.

I’ve been trying to use a pi4 as a desktop, with xfce, and was a bit disappointed. It’s usable but less than an old iPad. So I was surprised you got by with a pi2! I’ll have to give that h264ify a go.

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 :)

My mindset goes like this: in the early 90's, if I had a Sun SparcStation, I could do all this; a raspi2 is reasonably on par with that, so I should be able to do the same with a raspi2.

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.

Dietpi allows you to improve performance, overclock the CPU, etc

How do you handle multitasking? Do you shut down what you're doing and then switch to something else? I feel this creates a lot of friction. It could be good in a way b/c you don't get easily distracted :)

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?

My multitasking on such machine was limited to a few terminals, Chromium and other utilities. With the terminals, I had one with nano, another ocasionally compiling code and another with mutt; when compiling code, the system slowed down but I could still use nano. Chromium stayed with a few tabs open for querying stack overflow, google or wikipedia and when not using it its tabs were soon swapped out, so switching back to chromium and switching tabs took a few seconds after compiling something. With regard to other utilities, it was mostly hexchat for IRC and xmms for playing mp3. Not much, but I didn't need much more than that. Raspbian is a reasonably quick distro.

For entertainment it was good enough for old games and h264 1080p movies.

You can't really compare the Pi 2 to a 4. That's like comparing a 486 or Pentium to a Ryzen.

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.

Unfortunately, the $100 price tag puts the Pi 4 in an awkward place: Not cheap enough to be a hobbyist board, not powerful enough for "serious" things. To me, that's extremely unfortunate, because I think many, many more people need a cheap, underpowered board they can tinker with than need a PC with some exposed GPIOs.

It's $75 for an RPi 4b with 8GB of RAM! And from my experience it's quite powerful enough for a lot of "serious things", including most casual desktop computing needs. And it's only $35 with 2GB of RAM, which is all you need for all sorts of headless server tasks.

So I really don't get where you're coming from.

Maybe prices are cheaper in the US, on Amazon.de I could only find the 8 GB model for $100 and the 2 GB for $60.

Probably best to buy from official raspi reseller - form at bottom of <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/> with links given specs

Good call, thanks!

It's worth noting there's also some solid competition for Raspberry Pis by other companies making similar hobbyist boards. I'm pretty sure there's one out there that might fit your needs but I forget the name of it.

I heard that things like the Banana Pi (or similar) use horrid chipsets that have very limited support, so they might not actually be of similar utility. If you know of any good ones, though, I'd be grateful!

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 got a RockPi4 instead of raspi4. Definitely not as powerful but I don't regret it.

What are you talking about? What $100? It costs the same as rpi3 rpi2 or rpi1.

They might be talking about the 8Gb version

> - 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.

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.

> but that is it.

The python demo games that come pre-installed are quite fun. The list includes snake, 15-slide puzzle, and fun flood it clones

I understand what you mean, but these games are not very demanding. Weaker machines than a raspi could run these comfortably.

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.

Which could be easily coded on a ESP32, a device much better than typical MS-DOS PCs.

Amen about compiling large codebases. It took the better part of a day to compile MAME. zram is your friend.

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