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Comment by badtension | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone here is using RPi as a main PC? Seems to be capable of most office work with a bit of multimedia on the side. My laptop is dying and I would love to get something stationary that is low-power by default yet good enough so that the internet wouldn't lag.

Mounted at the back of an LCD screen could make a nice wireless setup with the other peripherals.

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I was using a Pi 400 for my programming PC, basically testing out if I can sell my gaming PC after I got my steam deck. It was perfectly capable for that task, and I’d say I would be happy to use it as my primary desktop PC.

Just sold my Pi 400 after the announcement of the Pi 5, deciding the Pi 5 will be my primary desktop PC. (Also ordered a Pi 4 because I have some other plans for it, but don’t want it built into a keyboard).

Falling back onto my Pi 3 I never really used before — it’s surprisingly capable. Not as a general desktop but gets my programming done fine. Its bottleneck seems to be I/O and limited RAM.

Thanks for the info! What system / DE do you intend on using? What type of work do you do on your computer?

I was thinking about getting a wireless keyboard+mice and attach RPi at the back of my monitor to have a clean and very low-power setup.

I think for many devs that can use dev containers or codespaces is more than okay.

Would not do heavy computing on it though, eslint alone for my use cases already kills my 8 core 7700x

Na it’s too slow.

I got one and I don’t touch it. I do also have an orange pi 5 and khandas edge 2 pro. Both are miles ahead of the rpi4 and based on specs they are miles ahead of the rpi5.

Are your other microcomputers capable of normal office operation?

100%.

I use them for development. One has ubuntu installed and the other Fedora.

Interesting. Can you give more details on your work? I've been on the edge lately over picking a desktop, an intel NUC or something like a Pi. Price to performance and power draw is something I'm considering.

Both I run JetBrains IDEs on both to do c++, rust, and .net work. One device is for work and one for personal.

https://www.khadas.com/edge2

https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-Computer-Frequency-Android/...

Same here. A great advantage of such devices is they can later be easily repurposed to control home automation, audio system or make a simple DIY project with them. It is much harder with other types of hardware, like a laptop for example.

In actual real benchmarking OPi5 is about the same as RPi5.

You’re joking right? It’s half the performance of the opi5…

The Pi 5 seems to be pretty head-to-head with the OPie 5: https://www.phoronix.com/review/raspberry-pi-5-benchmarks/3

> I wonder if anyone here is using RPi as a main PC? Seems to be capable of most office work with a bit of multimedia on the side. My laptop is dying and I would love to get something stationary that is low-power by default yet good enough so that the internet wouldn't lag.

Unfortunately, it is too slow to even smoothly power a desktop environment.

Thanks. This is a bit surprising to me since they advertise two 60 Hz 4K display drivers...

You can have 4k60 and still have open office take seconds to respond to a keyboard input.

Sure but why include that if a text processor is too much for the board? To display static images or demoscene visualisations?

If it's hardware accelerated it could still display that fine. I'm sure there are older games that could indeed run in 4k60fps

It will probably display video at those resolutions and refresh rates just fine, so it could be used for improvised commercial displays like a TV at a conference looping some information, for example.

The Raspberry Pi 4 could do a single monitor at 4K/60Hz.

The overall performance still wasn't great.

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