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Excellent! I tried out Ubuntu MATE 16.04 on a Raspberry Pi 3 a few months ago, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it runs. The 1GB RAM is an unfortunate

by alxmdev 10y ago

Excellent! I tried out Ubuntu MATE 16.04 on a Raspberry Pi 3 a few months ago, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it runs. The 1GB RAM is an unfortunate limitation, but even so the Pi is a viable little desktop. Great to see upstream kernel support and official releases from major distros.

swiley 10y ago
I've done quite a lot of homework on a Pi3 I got for free from someone who didn't want it. They're actually a functional desktop.
- paulmd 10y ago
  They work as a desktop but you're better off using something designed around the task. SD cards are not really designed for heavy random writes on a long-term basis and can be sensitive to corruption during brownouts that don't necessarily trigger a full system dropout. The GPU was primitive even for its day and has not gotten better with age. There's no SATA or USB 3.0, no GigE, and everything runs across a single USB 2.0 bus. For desktop or server use, the Pi is in the same price range as systems built on laptop chipsets (Kabini, Baytrail/Cherrytrail/Goldmont, etc). These can easily be had for sub-$150 normally and sub-$100 if you shop around. That's about the same price as the Pi once you factor in all the other things you have to purchase to get your "$35 computer" to boot. They are are lot faster and a lot more fully-featured. You can easily get SATA, GigE, USB 3.0, and you can even get ECC RAM on the AM1 platform. Also check out the Liva series from ECS and the ZBOX series from Zotac. Of course if you have the cash you can also look at a NUC or BRIX or other mini-PC but those are aimed a little higher in the market. Also it's kinda sad to hold up an Intel product as a positive example of open source, but it's much better than the Raspberry Pi. You are still reliant on binary blobs to boot the hardware to this day. The graphics stack is open source, the ThreadX-based VideoCore OS RTOS the GPU uses is not, and the documentation/drivers are restricted to usage only on official Raspberry Pi hardware.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    A lot of people seem to want something like a more-powerful Arduino that they can interface to a few I2C or SPI sensors, run some relays or servos, and embed into a project. Use your old cell phone charger, buy a microSD for $5, borrow a keyboard and some time on an HDMI TV to configure wifi, then just access it through VNC. Before the Pi3 with it's built-in wifi, it was also common to connect the Pi to a laptop with an ethernet cable and access it that way. For some people, one of those cheap X86 systems would make more sense, because they're trying to use it as a desktop or to do something that benefits from a higher-power CPU (real-time object recognition comes to mind). For a lot of others, a little ARM board hits a few important points: it's small, doesn't use much power, is easy to re-flash if it gets corrupted, is actually available in their country, is generally easy to adapt Arduino code to work on, and has a huge community around it focused on learning, experimentation, and building things. There's a nice little niche that it and similar boards fill.
    - paulmd 10y ago
      Yeah, it's nice for some embedded use-cases too but don't forget there's also BeagleBone Black and some other tools that fit that use-case as well. Or just a Bus Pirate in some situations. Depends on what you want to do. It's nice for some video things that really whale on the GPIOs. The "it's easy to reflash" thing really grinds me because it's just as easy to image any other type of disk too. Yeah, the BIOS is on the disk too, but that actually increases the chance of an accident since you can nuke it out with a disk operation. It's legitimately hard to nuke a conventional BIOS unless you're trying, and in theory UEFI should block writes of invalid firmware images (one of the rare happy side effects of the cryptographic signing). "using your old cellphone charger" is one of those things that sounds great in theory but you should actually never do in practice. The Pi takes a lot of power and needs much more voltage stability than a charging circuit. Using a random charger is asking for corruption issues because the SD card will silently fail writes. For object recognition, check out the Jetson TK1 and TX1 boards. They're more expensive than a Pi but CUDA GPU acceleration buys you a LOT more performance and you still fit into a tight power budget.
      - 10y ago

by alxmdev 10y ago

swiley 10y ago

I've done quite a lot of homework on a Pi3 I got for free from someone who didn't want it. They're actually a functional desktop.

paulmd 10y ago
They work as a desktop but you're better off using something designed around the task. SD cards are not really designed for heavy random writes on a long-term basis and can be sensitive to corruption during brownouts that don't necessarily trigger a full system dropout. The GPU was primitive even for its day and has not gotten better with age. There's no SATA or USB 3.0, no GigE, and everything runs across a single USB 2.0 bus. For desktop or server use, the Pi is in the same price range as systems built on laptop chipsets (Kabini, Baytrail/Cherrytrail/Goldmont, etc). These can easily be had for sub-$150 normally and sub-$100 if you shop around. That's about the same price as the Pi once you factor in all the other things you have to purchase to get your "$35 computer" to boot. They are are lot faster and a lot more fully-featured. You can easily get SATA, GigE, USB 3.0, and you can even get ECC RAM on the AM1 platform. Also check out the Liva series from ECS and the ZBOX series from Zotac. Of course if you have the cash you can also look at a NUC or BRIX or other mini-PC but those are aimed a little higher in the market. Also it's kinda sad to hold up an Intel product as a positive example of open source, but it's much better than the Raspberry Pi. You are still reliant on binary blobs to boot the hardware to this day. The graphics stack is open source, the ThreadX-based VideoCore OS RTOS the GPU uses is not, and the documentation/drivers are restricted to usage only on official Raspberry Pi hardware.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  A lot of people seem to want something like a more-powerful Arduino that they can interface to a few I2C or SPI sensors, run some relays or servos, and embed into a project. Use your old cell phone charger, buy a microSD for $5, borrow a keyboard and some time on an HDMI TV to configure wifi, then just access it through VNC. Before the Pi3 with it's built-in wifi, it was also common to connect the Pi to a laptop with an ethernet cable and access it that way. For some people, one of those cheap X86 systems would make more sense, because they're trying to use it as a desktop or to do something that benefits from a higher-power CPU (real-time object recognition comes to mind). For a lot of others, a little ARM board hits a few important points: it's small, doesn't use much power, is easy to re-flash if it gets corrupted, is actually available in their country, is generally easy to adapt Arduino code to work on, and has a huge community around it focused on learning, experimentation, and building things. There's a nice little niche that it and similar boards fill.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    Yeah, it's nice for some embedded use-cases too but don't forget there's also BeagleBone Black and some other tools that fit that use-case as well. Or just a Bus Pirate in some situations. Depends on what you want to do. It's nice for some video things that really whale on the GPIOs. The "it's easy to reflash" thing really grinds me because it's just as easy to image any other type of disk too. Yeah, the BIOS is on the disk too, but that actually increases the chance of an accident since you can nuke it out with a disk operation. It's legitimately hard to nuke a conventional BIOS unless you're trying, and in theory UEFI should block writes of invalid firmware images (one of the rare happy side effects of the cryptographic signing). "using your old cellphone charger" is one of those things that sounds great in theory but you should actually never do in practice. The Pi takes a lot of power and needs much more voltage stability than a charging circuit. Using a random charger is asking for corruption issues because the SD card will silently fail writes. For object recognition, check out the Jetson TK1 and TX1 boards. They're more expensive than a Pi but CUDA GPU acceleration buys you a LOT more performance and you still fit into a tight power budget.
    - 10y ago