What I learned from using a Raspberry Pi 5 as my main computer for two weeks

Pi 5's speed makes it a useful and usable general-purpose desktop, with limits.

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[pbcheese]

Is this the year of Linux on the desktop!?!

 

[Numfuddle]

A lot of open hardware projects inluding Amiga accelerator cards and C64 VIC chip replacements have come out over the last few years that are basically "slap a Raspberry Pi on a custom PCB and emulate some silicon with raw procesing power".

Which is both awesome and a testament to the versatility of this low cost platform but also a little concerning when every DIY HW project now expects you to source some variant of RPI with custom Linux distrinution or baremetal FW to act as a glorified 80s ASIC emulator.

Has driven up the prices of harder to source RPI variants even more.

edit: I'll still buy a RPI 5 eventually. Those things are great and are well supported by the community

 

[highwayinthesky]

I’ve always found it funny/depressing how if someone can’t get something on Windows or macOS working, people generally will try to help, or at least commiserate. If you can’t get something on Linux working, generally you get blamed/attacked for not understanding Linux well enough. This, from the alternative that’s supposed to revolve around “community.”

Edit: I mention this because of the aside in the article where Andrew mentions considering tossing his work to avoid being lambasted for “insufficient Linux chops.”

 

[betam4x]

It is a bit baffling that they messed up the video decoding/encoding bit.

Apparently the Pi 5 is not recommended as a Jellyfin server because it uses the CPU rather than the GPU for decoding/encoding/transcoding. I tried it for fun and they were right: unusable.

My experience with the Pi 5 (we bought the exact same case/cooler/pi and even have similar monitors) was similar to yours, however mine lives happily on as a multifunctional server.

 

[pbcheese]

I’ve always found it funny/depressing how if someone can’t get something on Windows or macOS working, people generally will try to help, or at least commiserate. If you can’t get something on Linux working, generally you get blamed/attacked for not understanding Linux well enough. This, from the alternative that’s supposed to revolve around “community.”

Edit: I mention this because of the aside in the article where Andrew mentions considering tossing his work to avoid being lambasted for “insufficient Linux chops.”

I’ve always found the Linux community to be very helpful and welcoming

 

[wallinbl]

It lacks handy window management features like window snapping, so the only way to manage windows is by dragging them around and manually resizing, minimizing, or maximizing.

For some of us, that's a pro, not a con. I'm not a fan of the OS effectively disallowing certain window placements by assuming I intend to snap or dock any time I get in certain areas. In fact, I never actually want that to happen.

 

[andrgl]

I’ve always found it funny/depressing how if someone can’t get something on Windows or macOS working, people generally will try to help, or at least commiserate. If you can’t get something on Linux working, generally you get blamed/attacked for not understanding Linux well enough. This, from the alternative that’s supposed to revolve around “community.”

I find Linux easier to search for issues and get more well documented solutions. It's gotten me to point of being comfortable downloading the source, editing and building the package.

Googling Windows issues is a fucking mess. I end up wading through a ton of content silo SEO sites. Even the Answers community on the Microsoft site is hit and miss with posts tagged as answers when they shouldn't be.

 

[mmiller7]

I’ve always found the Linux community to be very helpful and welcoming

It depends which community, and what you're asking.

Some can be decent, but a lot online are kinda shit. And I say this as someone who's used Linux at home as my primary system since 2017 and worked as a software engineer targeting Linux since 2012.

Even official support can be kinda snippy until you point out something like "the document you linked says X, but Y happens instead, and it does not address Y, how do you deal with Y".

 

[mmiller7]

For some of us, that's a pro, not a con. I'm not a fan of the OS effectively disallowing certain window placements by assuming I intend to snap or dock any time I get in certain areas. In fact, I never actually want that to happen.

I do kinda like snapping to left/right edges...but otherwise, no.

My work PC was upgraded to Windows 11 and now its perpetually trying to "snap" stuff all over the place when I just want to rearrange things...or I move something and it then minimizes everything trying to make me pick "which single other thing did you want to see" and I'm like AHHHHH I spent SO LONG getting my windows JUST how I wanted, and it went and ruined it all trying to ram decisions down my throat.

The "snap to" in Linux seems to be a window manager thing, Mint 21 Cinnamon does let me snap to top/bottom/left/right but that's about it. And fortunately it doesn't rearrange anything other than the thing you're moving when that happens.

 

[wombatcontrol]

I would guess that running a Pi on a single monitor at 1080p would probably provide a decent experience for most people. The lack of robust hardware video encode/decode is a big downfall though. It will be interesting to see if they come out with a Pi 500 as a desktop - I love the form factor and how it hearkens to the early days of computing like the C64.

 

[jhodge]

Not being comfortable with building from source is a real handicap when using Linux on ARM. I've got a Pinebook Pro, which is a nice little laptop, but making video acceleration work meant rebuilding FFMPEG from source with some community patches for example. IMO, Linux on ARM in 2023 is a lot like Linux on x86 in the early 2000's.

 

[4qu4rius]

Linux is a teetering stack of independently developed software projects that, on a good day, just barely manage to work together.

I find this rather inaccurate, especially given the billions this market is now (yes including desktop Linux).
My daily driver (including gaming with Steam) is Linux, and while I'm forced by work to use Windows, I cringe everytime I need to fix something on family computers that Windows intentionnaly destroyed ( defaults choices, botched updates..., arcane settings...)

Edit : spelling

 

[UserIDAlreadyInUse]

I've always seen the Pi as more of a "Let's see what kind of fun computer we can make of it" board than a general-computing type of board. A few years back, I saw someone turn a Pi Zero into a Neuromancer-style system with the display built into a pair of dual 2-inch screens they wore as glasses. A Pi4 as a Pip-Boy with a built in laser-display keyboard. Fun stuff like that.

 

[idontliketopickusernames]

I’ve always found it funny/depressing how if someone can’t get something on Windows or macOS working, people generally will try to help, or at least commiserate. If you can’t get something on Linux working, generally you get blamed/attacked for not understanding Linux well enough. This, from the alternative that’s supposed to revolve around “community.”

Edit: I mention this because of the aside in the article where Andrew mentions considering tossing his work to avoid being lambasted for “insufficient Linux chops.”

With the exception of the Arch community I've found it to be the exact opposite. Linux users are generally very eager to help. Of course you do have to ask intelligent questions. Simply saying "my PC won't boot, help!" or "tried that, didn't work" isn't going to get you very far. What's the error message? What command did you actually run, verbatim. But that's true anywhere you go.

 

[ars701]

I have a few on backorder with Sparkfun. There has been some controversy over the Raspberry Pi parent company, but I'm not sure if it's enough for me to cancel my backorder.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...aspberry-pi-hired-ex-cop-mastodon-controversy

 

[ZippyPeanut]

But, um,... Can it run Crysis?

 

[lolnova]

it’s hard to recommend the Pi over one of the many cheap Intel N100 mini PCs that can be had starting at around $150.

Or a used "1-liter" business PC, even one that's depreciated to about $100 in value will blow the doors off the Pi 5 in terms of compute capability.

 

[Skyssx]

I picked one up in person over Christmas. It is shockingly competent compared to my previous experience at Pis. The $5 HSF is a must; the SoC gets fingerprint removing hot. I've been running dual 1440 monitors with it and some GNOME... window... thingy. It would be hard for me to rate my experience more positively, but then i'm coming from Pi 3b+, not Pi4.

 

[Numfuddle]

Or a used "1-liter" business PC, even one that's depreciated to about $100 in value will blow the doors off the Pi 5 in terms of compute capability.

That's not really the use case for a Pie though, even though the articles makes it out to be. It's hard to fit a NUC into an Amiga 1200 case for example

 

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

An important hardware change is missing from the article - The Pi5 now has an onboard power button, next to the PCIe connector.
There are also a pair of PCB holes next to the RTC battery socket for installing a remote power button if your project doesn't allow access to the Pi.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

I bought the official Raspberry Pi 5 case and power supply from my local Micro Center, noting that the case came with its own cooler. I had assumed that this would be the same thing as the Raspberry Pi Active Cooler, a fairly substantial bit of aluminum with a fan mounted directly on top and coverage for most of the important chips on the top of the board. Unfortunately, the case's built-in cooler was less robust-looking—one of those cheap stick-on heatsinks for the main SoC, plus a fan mounted above it integrated into the lid of the case rather than attached to the heatsink directly.

The case's built-in cooler is still a heatsink with air moving over it, and it's better than nothing; at stock speeds during regular use, the Pi generally didn't seem to be overheating or throttling. But for the sake of playing with overclocks, I sprung for the Active Cooler, which is not only a much larger heatsink but includes a quieter fan with more fins. I'd only use the Pi 5 with no extra cooling at all if it was mostly being tasked with intermittent light-duty work (and if that's all you're doing, a cheaper Pi 4 may still be a viable option for you).

The Explaining Computers YouTube channel has tried various cooling options for the 5, including the active cooler, the case's included cooler, and a passive heatsink case of the style used in previous Pi generations.
Here's the video with the latest results:



A passive cooler can still keep the chip at less than 68C under a benchmark load for the duration of his testing. But he finds that the active cooler (the one sold separately from, but compatible with, the official case) gives the best results AND is rather quiet.
Thermal throttling happens at 80C, so even passive cooling should be able to keep it well under that at load (at stock clocks).

For desktop usage, he also trialed is in his video editing and video conferencing duties for a while (results are here) in case anyone else is curious.

It is a bit baffling that they messed up the video decoding/encoding bit.

Apparently the Pi 5 is not recommended as a Jellyfin server because it uses the CPU rather than the GPU for decoding/encoding/transcoding. I tried it for fun and they were right: unusable.

My experience with the Pi 5 (we bought the exact same case/cooler/pi and even have similar monitors) was similar to yours, however mine lives happily on as a multifunctional server.

Unfortunately my vague impression is that the Pi Foundation has cut back pretty dramatically on hardware-enabled acceleration for the two recent generations, handwaving complaints away with "the chip is fast enough to do it in software" or something. Licensing the firmware checklist can't be THAT expensive, especially since they did it for all the previous gens.

Not being comfortable with building from source is a real handicap when using Linux on ARM. I've got a Pinebook Pro, which is a nice little laptop, but making video acceleration work meant rebuilding FFMPEG from source with some community patches for example. IMO, Linux on ARM in 2023 is a lot like Linux on x86 in the early 2000's.

It has to be said, though, that the Pi is nothing like the Pine in terms of software ecosystem and support. The Pine stuff is like getting Linux to run on a laptop in 2002. The Pi is like Ubuntu in 2006.

The "snap to" in Linux seems to be a window manager thing, Mint 21 Cinnamon does let me snap to top/bottom/left/right but that's about it. And fortunately it doesn't rearrange anything other than the thing you're moving when that happens.

It's definitely window manager dependent.
It's possible to swap window managers without messing with the rest of the desktop environment (i.e. file manager, services, etc.) in most cases, though. Linux is kind of like having a Lego Technic set, by design a lot of the parts are relatively modular. Heck, if you want to you can even run maintained forks of stuff like CDE here in 2024.
But the Pi OS already ships with a very lightweight window manager and a few apps to make it a "desktop environment," mostly from the LXDE project. Like most platforms, you can swap out the default window manager for a tiling one if you really want to.

 

[Ostracus]

But even with 4GB or 8GB of RAM, the truth is that the Pi 4 was still using the equivalent of a budget smartphone processor.

Samsung Dex.

https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/

 

[ralphnobody]

Is this the year of Linux on the desktop!?!

I’m a long-time Windows user and system builder (like most here) who recently started using a Mac Mini.

I love it and here’s why: It’s a capable, stable, no-frills machine that does the job without a single hiccup.

It helps that MacOs has Office 365 and other productivity apps, but with Microsoft ruining the stability experience in Windows 10/11 what’s left?

I don’t see why these other low-power machines couldn’t also satisfy everyday, boring needs.

 

[paq]

It depends which community, and what you're asking.

Some can be decent, but a lot online are kinda shit. And I say this as someone who's used Linux at home as my primary system since 2017 and worked as a software engineer targeting Linux since 2012.

Even official support can be kinda snippy until you point out something like "the document you linked says X, but Y happens instead, and it does not address Y, how do you deal with Y".

Yes, but in that case help usually already exists, only the person asking didn't bother to read it or even look for it.
The general attitude is that everyone will happily help you ... if you at least tried to solve it yourself by googling it or otherwise. If on the other hand there's a pinned article how to solve an issue and you post the same question anyway you will receive a "snippy" answer.

 

[habilain]

Linux is a teetering stack of independently developed software projects that, on a good day, just barely manage to work together

Seems unnecessarily hostile to Linux, especially as I'm not sure that the author - by his own admission - knows enough about the subject. For example, the statement confusing Linux with Linux + a desktop environment. Besides, how many times has anyone looked at Windows and thought something similar - that the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing? How is it that Control Panel still exists, given Windows Settings has been around for 7 or 8 years? Driver issues? I'd argue that MacOS, iOS and Android (Linux derived) all have similar issues.

No general purpose operating system is small enough that it can be anything other than a stack of independently developed software projects.

 

[Jahmz]

Linux is a teetering stack of independently developed software projects that, on a good day, just barely manage to work together.

I'm hoping you meant this specific Linux Desktop environment. I get that you're a consumer hardware/Windows/Mac person, but this is not true for Linux in the server and infrastructure environment.

 

[DougAtFutoCa]

LLMs are making unix easier to use, I've done a couple of builds with the usually round of unexpected errors and hiccups while installing and configuring webservers and databases and a list of work software, and chat gpt 4 was surprising good at solving everything I asked it about. Hey my computer won't boot... comes back with a super helpful checklist that's not judgmental, and questions that mess up the terminology but get the general gist across that you wouldn't post to a board, or wouldn't quite land right in a google search are translated into: oh you mean this perfectly phrased and accurate thing, and here's 5 things you didn't think of to try next.

 

[pbcheese]

I’m a long-time Windows user and system builder (like most here) who recently started using a Mac Mini.

I love it and here’s why: It’s a capable, stable, no-frills machine that does the job without a single hiccup.

It helps that MacOs has Office 365 and other productivity apps, but with Microsoft ruining the stability experience in Windows 10/11 what’s left?

I don’t see why these other low-power machines couldn’t also satisfy everyday, boring needs.

I guess you weren’t on slashdot back in the oughts

 

[Mercster]

I’ve always found it funny/depressing how if someone can’t get something on Windows or macOS working, people generally will try to help, or at least commiserate. If you can’t get something on Linux working, generally you get blamed/attacked for not understanding Linux well enough. This, from the alternative that’s supposed to revolve around “community.”

Edit: I mention this because of the aside in the article where Andrew mentions considering tossing his work to avoid being lambasted for “insufficient Linux chops.”

Basically because documentation exists in Linux to a degree that is not true for Windows. It's also a pedagogical behavior... you'll be much better off if you get around to figuring WHAT kind of documentation you need, WHERE to find it, and HOW to put it to use. Most newbie questions are easily answered in some man page or HOWTO or other document... it's not necessarily how much you know, but rather if you know how to find out (without asking someone to bail you out.)

 

[gijames1225]

I have a few on backorder with Sparkfun. There has been some controversy over the Raspberry Pi parent company, but I'm not sure if it's enough for me to cancel my backorder.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...aspberry-pi-hired-ex-cop-mastodon-controversy

In an era of stupid controversies, that's a uniquely stupid one, lol.

 

[Mercster]

Seems unnecessarily hostile to Linux, especially as I'm not sure that the author - by his own admission - knows enough about the subject. For example, the statement confusing Linux with Linux + a desktop environment.

Nah, I've been running Linux since 1993, have had a career as a UNIX systems guy... he's right. Many functionalities hobbled together from disparate sources. This can be a good or bad thing; but the fact is, Microsoft or Apple have much more control over system consistency than a Linux distrbiution does.

 

[AlicePlaysWithRockets]

Thanks for the write up! While the Pi5 interests me, my Pi4-8gb is powerful enough for all my home server needs (HomeBridge with lots of plugins, Time Machine backups, AirPlay receiver, and a few other things). Devices like the Pi are more useful than x86 platforms for a few reasons: small size, low power usage, plenty of easy to use GPIO pins (I use mine with relays to control various devices around my home).

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Cool thanks bro... I can't even get my hands on a single one, which I need for a possible backup computer is my main box dies. I'm disabled on Social Security and can't collect them like baseball cards.

If you're not buying it to use as a DIY project of some kind, buy a used small form factor business PC instead. Price difference will be a wash and it'll run better.

 

[polerin]

I do kinda like snapping to left/right edges...but otherwise, no.

My work PC was upgraded to Windows 11 and now its perpetually trying to "snap" stuff all over the place when I just want to rearrange things...or I move something and it then minimizes everything trying to make me pick "which single other thing did you want to see" and I'm like AHHHHH I spent SO LONG getting my windows JUST how I wanted, and it went and ruined it all trying to ram decisions down my throat.

The "snap to" in Linux seems to be a window manager thing, Mint 21 Cinnamon does let me snap to top/bottom/left/right but that's about it. And fortunately it doesn't rearrange anything other than the thing you're moving when that happens.

I love powertoys for windows. You can define zones and it doesn't try to take over the window placement unless you use a hotkey drag. I have the zones swappable via my streamdeck, so I can move between task types really easily. Highly recommend for windows.

 

[Honeybog]

I find Linux easier to search for issues and get more well documented solutions. It's gotten me to point of being comfortable downloading the source, editing and building the package.

Googling Windows issues is a fucking mess. I end up wading through a ton of content silo SEO sites. Even the Answers community on the Microsoft site is hit and miss with posts tagged as answers when they shouldn't be.

Hi andrgl, welcome to the Microsoft Support Community. I understand you’re having issues with the Active Directory domain controller not replicating. Please refer to the following support document: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...-windows-73025246-b61c-40fb-671a-2535c7cd56c8

…

Hi andrgl, is your problem fixed? Please mark this question as solved.

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Hi andrgl, please mark this question as solve if this solution helped.

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Hi andrgl, please mark this as the solution if your problems have been corrected.

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Hi andrgl, we’re happy we could help you with this, this question has been marked as solved.

 

[jandrese]

The Achilles Heel of the Raspberry Pi is the Broadcom SOC that run the thing. Broadcom is at best indifferent and sometimes actively hostile to open source developers and it is always a fight to get their hardware working.