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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

My son currently does and has for about a year. I also have for short periods as computers were "in the shop." He's used a couple different pis with varying success. At least 4 GB of RAM is a must. The distro you run also matters a great deal.

The Pi4 with 8 GB is very usable as a main computer. I'm a Fedora person normally but for the Pi Raspbian is always my choice because it is so well optimized for low memory devices. Ubuntu MATE is fine too but not quite as optimized.

Always the biggest challenge is web browsing. Keep your tabs under control and web browsing on the Pi4 with 8 GB is fine. Firefox or Chrome doesn't matter too much. FF seems to be a little better on memory when memory is low (seems like maybe it swaps tab memory out to disk?) but I still use Auto Tab Discard to sleep tabs that aren't used.

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This is fascinating to me. 4GB of memory is not enough, on an OS "optimized for low memory devices"? What crazy world do we live in?

I remember browsing the web with 64 mb of RAM, upgraded from 16 MB, and a 100 MHz CPU.

I'm not saying you're wrong in any sense. I'm just marveling at the state of memory use in computing.

a Pi would probably zoom through browsing HTML 2.0 websites made in 1995 without much memory fuss, even in a modern browser. there just aren't many such websites

HN is a refreshing exception

And then some.

I shipped a system two years ago that consisted of a handful of Pi4's running Chromium in kiosk mode, each pointing at a different page that was being served by an Intel NUC running .NET Core Razor pages on the local network.

And one of those pages was playing 2-6 video loops! Smooth experience without a hiccup. I mean, I expected it to work just fine, but I was still impressed.

As someone who lived through "64K should be plenty" and often used computers with little more than 4K RAM, I absolutely agree. This is one of the major "bloatware" features of modern computers which could extend Moore's Law a decade or more with mere software changes.

you may like what Niklaus Wirth argued 1995 https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf

My Linux machine boots X with less than 300 MB (no desktop, StumpWM, SystemD and PulseAudio on NixOS). It's probably possible to compress it further.

The problem might come from heavy webapps, but its doable to work with just 2 GB and 4 GB never posed a problem.

One of the problems with hardware constantly better is we are increasingly becoming modes tolerant of poorly optimized code. Fact: all second hand devices like cheap tablets, windows xp computers and what not work great until you connect them to the internet. I’m still waiting to be able to run complete hardware virtualization from an ARM processor so I can turn my phone into a hypervisor

As a web developer, this is one reason I enjoy working with microcontrollers in my spare time. There's something immensely satisfying in writing software that does something useful on a chip with 80 KB of RAM.

I have no problem browsing the web on a thinkpad laptop with 4gb of RAM. I’ve always suspected that the issue with Pis is that they fall over when they try to write to swap. The SD card can’t handle it. The RAM isn’t really the limitation, it’s using an SD card for swap. Can anyone confirm?

I wonder how much zram would help (compresses part of your ram). It would reduce caching be then your cpu would need to decpompress a lot.

swapping to 'disk' on a raspberry pi using a microsd card for primary storage seems like a very quick way to kill your microsd card considering the poor number of write cycles per cell on those, compared to a real ssd, and overall write endurance. not a factor if you swap device is on something like a usb3-connected $50 consumer grade ssd plugged into the raspberry pi.

I’m surprised swap is enabled at all, if most users are running from SD cards. They should have went the Android route and treat it more like a phone than a computer

it's been a while since I looked at it in details but it looks like raspbian has a default swap of only 100MB, you'd have to manually increase it if needed.

https://cloudolife.com/2021/01/01/Raspberry-Pi/Resizing-or-d...

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