 Can you actually use a raspberry pi as a desktop replacement? I actually tried this I actually lived in a raspberry pi as my home computer for about a month So you guys know a few months ago I actually moved into a new office my my studio here that I typically record in and I only had one home computer at The time my workstation my desktop tower. I moved it to this office meaning I didn't have a home computer I actually went without a home computer for a little over three months because Just prices of computer parts were outrageous. It was hard to find graphics cards So I went three months without any home computer and for the first two months of that. I just was fine with it I just wanted to completely unplug while I was at home. I was experimenting with that idea I actually haven't had a TV in years and then not having a computer It was actually kind of nice But then at the same time sometimes I did need to actually do work at home It would have been nice to at least have the option to occasionally Log into a computer and do I don't know show notes for the next day You know in preparation for videos and things like that. So after about two months. I decided to do an experiment I've got raspberry pies. I've got some older raspberry pi 3s And I also have a raspberry pi 4 which the raspberry pi 4 is a couple of years old at this point It's not new but when it came out It was a major upgrade for raspberry pies and the fact that it had eight gigs of RAM and with eight gigs of RAM I thought you know what it might be able to serve as a proper desktop computer So I experimented with the idea. I went ahead and installed manjaro Raspberry pi arm addition on that thing and it it kind of worked certainly the raspberry pi 4 Kind of worked certainly better than the old raspberry pi 3 I actually have a pi 3 and a pi 4 both of them. They look very similar This is from Kana kit it comes with a case if I took the top off You can actually see the board actually the board is underneath but yet uh, what does he heat sink there? You also have a fan you can install if you want to actually did install the fan and the pi 4 I've actually got the pi 4 plugged in over here I'm going to show you a little bit of that in just a second But all you need to do for those of you that are unfamiliar with these things these things run off a SD card, right? And what you need to do is just flash an image to a SD card and if you buy the Kana kit Pies they actually come with a USB stick here You actually can undo this and this little USB stick has a slot for a SD card to slide in there so put the SD card in the USB stick and then put the USB stick in your computer and Flash the image with something like etcher on Linux or Rufus on Windows And what you do is you flash that that image to the SD card plug the SD card into your raspberry pi and then run through the installation of Whatever raspberry pi Linux distribution you want obviously manjaro is the one I'm using manjaro has a really nice arm addition Debian has arm additions arch Linux has arm additions actually the Kana kit The SD cards that they come with are already flashed with a distribution called noobs Which is based on Debian arm now years ago with the raspberry pi model 3 I actually did play around with the idea of could it be a desktop replacement the problem with the pi 3 It was a major upgrade from the pi 1 and the pi 2 But the pi 3 still only came with 1 gig of RAM 1 gig of RAM is tough Especially if you're gonna do anything with a web browser web browsers are slow heavy bloated They they require a ton of RAM one gig around is just not enough and that was years ago for the pi 3 The web and modern web browsers are so much more bloated than they were even five years ago A pi 3 would never work and to be honest the pi 4 kind of doesn't work either I ran into the issue with the pi 4 when I launched something like Firefox or a cute browser It would take I don't know 30 seconds to a minute to open up not a huge problem again It's not going to be great, but was it usable yet? I can wait a minute for my web browser to open up the very first time, but how do web pages render? They're a little slow. They're not horribly slow. I mean, it's not to the point where it's just painful It's okay. One thing you can't do though It's not gonna play multimedia for you at least not high definition You're not going to watch high-def videos on YouTube You're not gonna watch high-definition videos on things like Netflix or Hulu or things like that It's not gonna handle anything 1080p or even higher. You just forget about that I wouldn't even do 720p, but if you're doing something like watching a YouTube video for 80p, that's okay That's doable. It's still not a great experience, but just surfing the web. Yeah, you'll be fine Now because the pi 4 has 8 gigs of RAM it is usable, but there's still one bottleneck We need to talk about and that's the the CPUs and these things. It's not a great CPU So when you run an update, it takes forever when you install software It takes forever and I actually installed some software this morning on the pi 4 in preparation for this video I wanted to just update the system to make sure I had the latest and greatest packages installed So the pi 4 I got a new home computer about two weeks ago So that pi 4 hasn't been updated and at least two weeks because I unplugged it, right? So it's probably been two maybe three weeks since the last manjaro arm update on that So I ran through an update it needed to update about a hundred and twenty hundred and thirty packages Which typically on arch Linux or manjaro or arco any arch based system, you know a hundred and twenty packages What do you think five minutes probably less to do that update? It took me 45 minutes To do that update of a hundred and twenty packages on that raspberry pi 4. That's not unusual either That's how long it takes pretty much any time you do updates because the CPU is slow It takes a while to to build things and do things. It's it's not a powerful machine by any means Now let me switch over to my raspberry pi 4 desktop I installed manjaro arm with the XFCE desktop but I installed Qtile and my Qtile configs on top of it Because you guys know I like tiling window managers Qtile was in manjaro arms repositories So here is manjaro arm the XFCE edition. It is your standard XFCE desktop environment I actually didn't do too much in XFCE because I quickly installed the Qtile window manager inside this So actually let me log out and show you the desktop. I actually lived in for about a month So how do I log out here? I forget how to use XFCE sometimes. There's the log out button So now that I'm in the log in manager What I'm going to do is I'm going to go up here and choose Qtile instead of XFCE and then let me go ahead and log in So this is my Qtile desktop This is the Qtile window manager and the reason I went with Qtile instead of Xmone ad is I don't think I think I had some Problems getting Xmone ad or Xmone ad can trip or Xmobar some of those Haskell stuff I it wasn't really packaged for the arm edition of manjaro But Qtile was in the repositories and I quite like Qtile Qtile It's basically a an exact clone of Xmone ad almost it's written in Python So since it was in the repositories I installed Qtile Then I went and grabbed my Qtile configs from my dot files repository on my git lab And then I installed the ST terminal because I have my own build of ST And I installed my shell color scripts program You can see I get a random shell color script every time I open the ST terminal So all of that works and of course the main thing I need for work as far as you know Any kind of show notes any kind of scripting I do typically I do everything in Emax So I launch Emax here. You see that actually launches pretty quick now The Emax daemon is running in the background. So this is a Emax client But you can see that actually launches rather quickly if I wanted to just edit some out I don't know the bash RC just to open something here You know it takes a couple of seconds to open that but it's fine It's certainly usable. You do notice a little bit of input lag sometimes when you're typing Blazing fast, you know, but again the raspberry pi the limitations really the CPU is kind of the limitation on the pie But it is certainly usable I really have no complaints as far as working in the terminal and working in inside Emax now We're some of my complaints Really start would be let me open up Firefox. Did I install Firefox? I think I installed both Firefox and Qt browser Let's see how long it takes for Firefox to load on the raspberry pi and We're waiting We're still waiting And we're still waiting. All right It it finally launched there, which you know, that actually isn't too bad again I like I said if it takes 60 seconds to start Firefox I mean you're only starting your browser typically one time But let's go ahead and open something like my get lab. Let's see how long this page takes to render Because this is the annoying part if pages typically take forever to load On my regular computer on my desktop, you know, this would have already loaded, but we're still waiting We're still waiting Yeah, I would say, you know, it probably is gonna take yeah here it comes Yeah, that's probably five six times slower to load a page than what it would be on my regular computer now Is that painful? It's annoying, but it's not painful It's not painful if this is your only desktop computer if you had to use the raspberry pi 4 as a desktop again It's perfectly usable again rendering webpages is slow for high definition video. Just forget about it We should talk about gaming the raspberry pi 4 is perfect for gaming if you're doing retro gaming I'm talking about old school, you know 8 bit 16 bit gaming from like the Atari days or the original Nintendo or even the super Nintendo things like that because the raspberry pi 4 it's weak compared to modern computers But compared to those old school consoles the raspberry pi 4 is blazing fast It'll play all those retro games just fine. Will it play anything modern as far as gaming? Absolutely not You're not gonna launch steam. You're not gonna get call of duty to work. It's just gonna laugh at you Yeah, this is never gonna happen. You're not just some of the free and open source games that are out there super tucks I'm sure probably wouldn't work zero ad forget about it. No chance as Demanding as that game is so the pi 4 would be fine for retro gaming But anything any game made in the last I don't know 15 20 years. I would just completely ditch that idea That's not gonna work So does the raspberry pi 4 serve as a suitable desktop replacement? Kind of it depends. It's very limited. You can actually do some basic computing It certainly is better than not having a computer at all. Will you have some pain points? Will there be some frustrations? Sure But again, it's for an emergency situation like I had where you know I didn't have a computer for a couple of months This thing actually did serve a real purpose and I was glad I had it now before I go I need to think a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode Of course, I'm talking about absy Gabe James Mitchell Paul Scott with a commie Ellen Chuck Kurt David Dylan Gregory Heiko Mike hurry on Alexander peace arch and fedora polytech raver red prophet Steven and Willie these guys They're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode about Using the raspberry pi 4 as a desktop replacement This show wouldn't have been possible shows also brought you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well All these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on patreon because the distro tube channel I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys the community If you like my work and want to support me look for distro tube over on patreon. All right guys peace I'm so glad to have a real computer again