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I Replaced My MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB for a Day

7 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

rvz 6y ago
In the end, you will be disappointed with the latter if you love running your Electron apps + Firefox or Chromium on this device.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Surprisingly, that was the least of the issues I encountered. I used Slack all day inside Chromium, and besides the fact that it took ~5 seconds to get back to a workable state whenever I switched back to its tab, it was perfectly usable and didn't really hinder my ability to communicate. Also, Slack is slow enough on my core i9, so I'll give the Pi a pass if it's even a little slower there. It just pushes me back more and more to preferring IRC, since I can chat from any device, anywhere (Pidgin in the Raspberry Pi's case), without having to load up 500+ MB of RAM for a fancy GUI.
  - rvz 6y ago
    Running Slack in Chromium is fine for the Pi, but not what I mean. I meant running separate electron apps and Chromium at the same time. I doubt that it could handle three or five of them running at the same time which most users would be trying to do.
steffan 6y ago
A minor correction - You can run a Raspbery Pi 4 @ 4K / 60Hz over HDMI. I'm doing it on an LG 32UD59-B. It did take a tiny bit of research and a non-obvious change to the monitor settings.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Good point. As with so many other things I ran into throughout the day, it comes down to "how many hours do I want to dedicate to searching docs and forums, tweaking obscure settings in config files and rebooting my Pi to try to get it to do things my macOS/Windows 10 laptops do out of the box?" (Also, can you link to what the setting is or mention it? I'd love to give it a try and see if I can get it working with my LG 27UD68-P.) And that's just the thing. I think there are a lot of people in the HN community who are saying right now "geerlingguy's an idiot, it's so easy to tweak all these settings!" But I care more about picking something up and starting to use it immediately. Defaults matter, and ecosystem matters. And it's not like the Pi Foundation is not trying—things have improved _vastly_ in the past decade. And that's why I tried this experiment finally (the Pi 4 is mostly-adequate, hardware-wise, for what I do). But I now know some of the things I would want to see before I could consider moving all my non-text-editor/k8s/infra-dev work over to a Pi-based or even Linux-based desktop.
steffan 6y ago
You've inspired me to write a counterpoint - I tried the same, and for a pretty large set of things I do day-to-day, the Raspberry Pi has been working well. So much so that I am currently engaged in an internal debate on whether or not I should purchase a more powerful machine to use as a desktop. The only real deficit to me is that initial compiles of Rust code can take a while. A vast amount of CPU / Memory is available for pennies on an EC2 instance, so it comes down to convenience and psychology, really.

7 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

rvz 6y ago

In the end, you will be disappointed with the latter if you love running your Electron apps + Firefox or Chromium on this device.

geerlingguy 6y ago
Surprisingly, that was the least of the issues I encountered. I used Slack all day inside Chromium, and besides the fact that it took ~5 seconds to get back to a workable state whenever I switched back to its tab, it was perfectly usable and didn't really hinder my ability to communicate. Also, Slack is slow enough on my core i9, so I'll give the Pi a pass if it's even a little slower there. It just pushes me back more and more to preferring IRC, since I can chat from any device, anywhere (Pidgin in the Raspberry Pi's case), without having to load up 500+ MB of RAM for a fancy GUI.
- rvz 6y ago
  Running Slack in Chromium is fine for the Pi, but not what I mean. I meant running separate electron apps and Chromium at the same time. I doubt that it could handle three or five of them running at the same time which most users would be trying to do.

steffan 6y ago

A minor correction - You can run a Raspbery Pi 4 @ 4K / 60Hz over HDMI. I'm doing it on an LG 32UD59-B. It did take a tiny bit of research and a non-obvious change to the monitor settings.

geerlingguy 6y ago
Good point. As with so many other things I ran into throughout the day, it comes down to "how many hours do I want to dedicate to searching docs and forums, tweaking obscure settings in config files and rebooting my Pi to try to get it to do things my macOS/Windows 10 laptops do out of the box?" (Also, can you link to what the setting is or mention it? I'd love to give it a try and see if I can get it working with my LG 27UD68-P.) And that's just the thing. I think there are a lot of people in the HN community who are saying right now "geerlingguy's an idiot, it's so easy to tweak all these settings!" But I care more about picking something up and starting to use it immediately. Defaults matter, and ecosystem matters. And it's not like the Pi Foundation is not trying—things have improved _vastly_ in the past decade. And that's why I tried this experiment finally (the Pi 4 is mostly-adequate, hardware-wise, for what I do). But I now know some of the things I would want to see before I could consider moving all my non-text-editor/k8s/infra-dev work over to a Pi-based or even Linux-based desktop.

steffan 6y ago

You've inspired me to write a counterpoint - I tried the same, and for a pretty large set of things I do day-to-day, the Raspberry Pi has been working well. So much so that I am currently engaged in an internal debate on whether or not I should purchase a more powerful machine to use as a desktop. The only real deficit to me is that initial compiles of Rust code can take a while. A vast amount of CPU / Memory is available for pennies on an EC2 instance, so it comes down to convenience and psychology, really.