this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Holy fucking nope. I wasn't planning on getting Windows 11 and this serves as a great reminder to make the transition to Linux. I've been thinking of picking up a raspberry pi 5 as my next desktop. Anyone want to share their experiences doing something similar?
My kids use odroid c4 devices. Great for browsing and videos, absolutely no gaming unless it's old and native (quake 2, half life, ...) or browser games like blockpost. They play the bejeezus out of that. All in all pretty good choice. It being both Linux and arm reduces the attack surface a bit considering these are kids with internet access.
If you like the form factor but prefer x86_64 then you could look into UP board series.
The pi is very weak. Just get a normal desktop. They have small form factor ones.
Wouldn’t go for a full ARM64 system (yet anyway). Too many software incompatibilities. You can pick up the lenovo m-series tiny machines used for dirt cheap and have full x86 compatibility and way faster specs + expandable storage/ram for (m93p tiny, m700, m720 etc). They’re a little bigger than a rpi and use a bit more power but it will save a ton of headaches.
Making the switch to any linux distro is a big jump already, you don’t want to create unnecessary problems.
That's a good point. I hadn't factored in the processor architecture at all, whoops. I've already got plenty of Linux experience though, so I just need to find hardware that can support a wide variety of software. Thanks for the recommendations!
You can get a decent five year old ThinkPad off ebay that will run circles around an rpi5 for most tasks. The price, after case, power supply, and storage won't be that far off either.
Honestly with how that company is going you might be better off getting a cheap rig and installing your favourite flavour of Linux. I'm still salty their implementation of surround sound and video decoding can't use the actual power of the chip it's running on.
I would personally avoid the pi 5 for desktop computing purely because it only has micro/mini (whatever they call them) HDMI ports, imo they are kinda awful.
Also do note that being an arm device you will be limited on proprietary software and even among foss stuff will likely have to compile some things yourself.
(P.S. you probably don’t mind if you are considering such a device, but PC gaming on arm devices will take much more setup and the performance might be disappointing when using a x86 emulator like FEX)
Lol the little TV attached Lenovo PCs are pretty good for small desktops.
Yeah, honestly I don't see the use case for pi as a desktop.
It's cool to have it as a second device running little things you want to have up more of the time, but the desktop performance would be pretty limiting imo for most people.