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I have a Raspberry Pi 4. If you use the official distro, which includes all the hacks to make the hardware function, it works well yes but only barely. Try any

I have a Raspberry Pi 4. If you use the official distro, which includes all the hacks to make the hardware function, it works well yes but only barely. Try any other distro and it does not work very well since Linux itself doesn't actually have a lot of suppprt upstreamed. I have to use binary blobs, tweak lots of knobs etc to make simple things like video playback work. Some (all?) distros still recommend 32-bits due to limited support for 64-bits still. Quite eye opening for me as i always thought support for Raspberry Pi was of a high standard. The reality couldnt be further than the truth. Ironically I have a Lenovo which works well out of the box with no blobs or weird hacks on Arch or Debian (despite no official support for my particular model that I know of). The latter is what I would describe as "well supported by the Linux kernel". Certaintly not Raspberry Pi.

foxfluff 5y ago
I never liked the Pi's NIH config stuff, but I'm running 64 bit Alpine Linux on a Pi 4 without any major issues. Still it's quite underpowered for me to treat it like a daily use laptop/pc.
- kiwijamo 5y ago
  Are you able to play videos on it? Arch Linux ARM struggles to play videos smoothly. The official distribution seems to be better only if you use their Desktop Environment and certain blessed apps—I switched to a different DE and all of a sudden my smooth video playback broke. Asked around regarding video playback on Arch and was told to stick with the 32-bits edition instead. Agree it's no daily driver. It's great as a Samba server though which I use to share files etc—currently using the official OS for this but my next project for it is to switch to Arch which I use for all my other Linux devices. Was hoping to use it as a driver for my TV but have decided to just use it as a file server instead and watch videos over the network.

foxfluff 5y ago

I never liked the Pi's NIH config stuff, but I'm running 64 bit Alpine Linux on a Pi 4 without any major issues. Still it's quite underpowered for me to treat it like a daily use laptop/pc.

kiwijamo 5y ago
Are you able to play videos on it? Arch Linux ARM struggles to play videos smoothly. The official distribution seems to be better only if you use their Desktop Environment and certain blessed apps—I switched to a different DE and all of a sudden my smooth video playback broke. Asked around regarding video playback on Arch and was told to stick with the 32-bits edition instead. Agree it's no daily driver. It's great as a Samba server though which I use to share files etc—currently using the official OS for this but my next project for it is to switch to Arch which I use for all my other Linux devices. Was hoping to use it as a driver for my TV but have decided to just use it as a file server instead and watch videos over the network.