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Comment by schlauerfox | Hacker News Reader

I bought a 400 mostly to support them and I like the designs the PI team does. It felt a bit underpowered as someone with a powerful x86 fedora desktop, but it reminds me of the 'cheap enough to let a kid play/break it' hand-me-down computers I grew up with. I wish I had more time to tinker around, build a 'cyberdeck'.

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I’ve found that the Plan9 operating system flies on Pi3 and Pi4; if you have any interest in using Plan9 you could check it out.

I also got a 400 for my kid. It was an ok experience, but I had reliability problems. Just wouldn’t turn on consistently! This made it frustrating for the kid to engage with even though he enjoyed it when available.

I think the problem was a compatibility issue between the Pi’s video output and the old TV I was using as a monitor. I used a fresh micro HDMI to full HDMI cable as a direct connection, but still took a lot of fiddling to get it on.

Now I’m building a full sized PC for him. We built a KBDcraft Adam keyboard for it together, which he really enjoyed https://kbdcraft.store/products/adam

Give Alpine Linux (RPi version) a try. I mostly moved away from RPis but wanted to try it anyway and was suprised of how small and efficient it is, just like on other platforms; musl makes a ton of difference. Too bad they have ready images for the RPi but none for other ARM boards; that would be a godsend.

See: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/10/cyberdecking-raspberry-pi-400-o...

Exactly what I did with my original raspi…. Gave it to my son, and he used it to learn about over clocking.

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