6 ms·

I tried. I just wanted a machine on my workbench to run a web browser. I got the best Raspberry Pi, a case, and plugged it into an old 24" monitor. Cost me abou

by leros 5y ago

I tried. I just wanted a machine on my workbench to run a web browser. I got the best Raspberry Pi, a case, and plugged it into an old 24" monitor. Cost me about $80-100. It worked fine. It could even play a 1080p YouTube video. However, everything lagged. The most painful thing was that it took several seconds to render a website when it's normally instantaneous. I found it quite frustrating to use, so I ended up buying a $200 mini desktop computer that runs fantastic.

alexk307 5y ago
Could have been the browser? Or the network interface? Did you ever figure out why?
- agloeregrets 5y ago
  Doesn't help that the pi 4 has a single-core performance that is 1/5th that of a current smartphone. If you are coming from fast hardware, the pi 4 is quite bad. I would love to see someone make a $99 product in this range with something moderately fast.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    People have long been fascinated with "alternative" architectures for general purpose computing but most of the time you pay a little bit less (1/2) but pay dearly in terms of performance (more than 1/5 compared to a low end laptop.) It has a lot to do with why cable boxes suck. ARM is the first architecture in 20 years that competes with x86 on reasonably priced machines. (e.g. IBM POWER and IBM z are pretty quick but you can't afford them)
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      > ARM is the first architecture in 20 years that competes with x86 on reasonably priced machines. (e.g. IBM POWER and IBM z are pretty quick but you can't afford them) What about the PPC Macs? Yes, they were bad enough that Apple had to switch to x86—not exactly a ringing endorsement—but I'd say they were at least somewhat competitive, no?
      - PaulHoule 5y ago
        Yeah, the power macs were usable in the early 00's but they were slipping fast. I don't know if I'd count macs as "alternative" because, despite their good qualities, they are more locked down than PCs. SPARC was almost viable for a desktop machine in the early 00's, I had one under my desk that I was running a Sun Ray server on. We were hoping to use Sun Rays to provide access to the online catalog and other web resources but after Netscape became a non-viable web browser we were never able to get Mozilla to build on SPARC. It could have been ported but we didn't have the resources and nobody else bothered to do it. SPARC was slipping too and the price was not right.
        Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        > I don't know if I'd count macs as "alternative" because, despite their good qualities, they are more locked down than PCs. What do you mean here? Couldn't Power Macs run Linux?
        adamomada 5y ago
        I don’t remember much about it but they even had a bootloader called Open Firmware. Assuming its not a joke, GP has it dead wrong.
        johnklos 5y ago
        I don't know if I'd agree that SPARC would've ever been viable. The performance just wasn't there for the price. For instance, my 2002 AlphaServer DS25 with two 1 GHz CPUs runs many workloads noticeably faster than my 2007 Sun Fire V245 with two 1.5 GHz UltraSPARC IIIi CPUs. Also, Macs were never locked down. All Macs can run alternate OSes, from m68k Macs which can still run modern NetBSD without issues, to beige PCI Power Macs, to G3, G4 and G5 Power Macs, to Intel Macs, and now ARM Macs. Notably missing is support for NuBus Power Macs which requires more work than people are willing to do, although older MkLinux was available for them.
  - jraph 5y ago
    Pine64's RockPro 64 with 4GB RAM is $80 ($60 for the 2G version) and felt reasonably fast when one day I had to temporarily use it to surf the web. Mind the shipping price and doll fees though. https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/ https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/
- netsharc 5y ago
  Browser engines need a lot of computing to know what color each pixel of a page needs to be, for each pixel: the typeface affects it, the background image of all the parent elements (in case of transparency) affects it, the CSS positioning of the elements affects it (there could be a white title text, but an annoying cookie popup with a semi-dark background means it needs to be displayed as a greyed out text).
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    They really don't though, they could do it just fine in 1995. Browsers have bloated into crazy complex machines though that do way more than rendering some text and graphics. The simple rendering is not why browsers are slow on RPis.
    - leros 5y ago
      HTML is simple. Add CSS and dynamic DOM manipulation and it's whole different situation.
      - colechristensen 5y ago
        The javascript stuff that transformed hypertext documents into fully fledged applications is complicated. HTML and CSS really isn't. It's hard to have an unbiased opinion about what is easy and what is hard for a computer to do. Much of what is done on the web could be 90% as good with 10% of the complexity, but we're buried under too many layers of abstraction, bloat, and "improvement".
    - rwalle 5y ago
      Enough of such comments. Obviously you have never worked much in the front end or the web user experience, and don't understand the complexity or the difficulty of such technologies. Anyone saying "things were fine in 1995" is ignoring how non-interactive, non-intuitive how web pages were, and how much more pleasant it is to look at a web page and get the information today. It is true that some web pages are using unnecessary (or even too much) animations and such and may have a negative effect on user experience or accessibility, but there is no doubt that the web is a better place than it was in 1995. And I'm sorry to say that your personal opinion does not matter, and the web is never going back to 1995.
- leros 5y ago
  I played around a lot and never got it to improve. I think it's just limited compute resources on the Pi and the fact that web browsers and websites have become massive. It takes a lot to a render a webpage these days. It might have been lack of GPU. Moving windows around the screen was also really painful, probably 1-2 fps render rate as I dragged. I know browsers off-load a lot to GPUs these days too, so that could explain the slow browser rendering.
kcb 5y ago
Yup the Pi 4 is still not there yet. You'd be much better served by something like an off lease sff business desktop. Even things as old as a 2nd Gen Intel Core series CPU will feel significantly better for browsing than a Pi.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dfcab 5y ago
Curious, what mini-desktop pc did you go with?
- WithinReason 5y ago
  Beelink makes some decent x86 boxes around that price
  - dfcab 5y ago
Scramblejams 5y ago
The most painful thing was that it took several seconds to render a website when it's normally instantaneous A ton of that went away for me on my Rpi4 when I switched from sdcard to using a USB NVMe adapter[0] with a decent M.2 SSD in it. And I was using an sdcard recommended for its performance! Try it. It's astonishing how badly that sdcard holds a Pi back in interactive use. [0] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08G14NBCS https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08G14NBCS This one supports trim, which is nice, not all USB M.2 adapters do. I've forgotten a lot of the details from when I researched it, but IIRC if your adapter supports UASP, that's a pretty good indicator of trim support.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Same here. That SD is a huge bottleneck and a reliability Achilles heel as well. Faster cards reduce the bottleneck somewhat, and constant write (videosurveillance) cards reduce the Achilles heel somewhat by increasing time between failure. But only a real SSD fixes both at the same time.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
LeFantome 5y ago
My wife bought a 2008 iMac for $50 but never used it. One day my laptop broke and I put Manjaro Linux on the iMac, hoping I could use it for a few days knowing it would suck. The screen was nice but it only had 6 GB of RAM, a spinning hard drive, and a Core Duo processor. Thing is, I still use it all the time. It is the computer I use most often for Zoom and Teams. Web browsing is very good. I use the latest releases of Firefox, Brave, and Edge. Much of my earlier learning around Docker and Podman was on that iMac. It worked great. I find that older computers work better than underpowered but current stuff, at least with regards to price performance. The one way that old hardware is worse I suppose is in power usage.
- nonamenoslogan 5y ago
  I'm still using a 2006ish ThinkPad with a CoreDuo in it and only 2Gb of RAM nearly daily, there is still a lot of computing power out there in some of these oldies if one is willing to try.
- leros 5y ago
  The funny thing about some apps is they enable different strategies based on the hardware available. It's why a Chrome tab will use 1GB of RAM on a beefy machine but also run fine on a a machine with 1GB total RAM.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by leros 5y ago

alexk307 5y ago

Could have been the browser? Or the network interface? Did you ever figure out why?

agloeregrets 5y ago
Doesn't help that the pi 4 has a single-core performance that is 1/5th that of a current smartphone. If you are coming from fast hardware, the pi 4 is quite bad. I would love to see someone make a $99 product in this range with something moderately fast.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  People have long been fascinated with "alternative" architectures for general purpose computing but most of the time you pay a little bit less (1/2) but pay dearly in terms of performance (more than 1/5 compared to a low end laptop.) It has a lot to do with why cable boxes suck. ARM is the first architecture in 20 years that competes with x86 on reasonably priced machines. (e.g. IBM POWER and IBM z are pretty quick but you can't afford them)
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    > ARM is the first architecture in 20 years that competes with x86 on reasonably priced machines. (e.g. IBM POWER and IBM z are pretty quick but you can't afford them) What about the PPC Macs? Yes, they were bad enough that Apple had to switch to x86—not exactly a ringing endorsement—but I'd say they were at least somewhat competitive, no?
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      Yeah, the power macs were usable in the early 00's but they were slipping fast. I don't know if I'd count macs as "alternative" because, despite their good qualities, they are more locked down than PCs. SPARC was almost viable for a desktop machine in the early 00's, I had one under my desk that I was running a Sun Ray server on. We were hoping to use Sun Rays to provide access to the online catalog and other web resources but after Netscape became a non-viable web browser we were never able to get Mozilla to build on SPARC. It could have been ported but we didn't have the resources and nobody else bothered to do it. SPARC was slipping too and the price was not right.
      - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        > I don't know if I'd count macs as "alternative" because, despite their good qualities, they are more locked down than PCs. What do you mean here? Couldn't Power Macs run Linux?
        adamomada 5y ago
        I don’t remember much about it but they even had a bootloader called Open Firmware. Assuming its not a joke, GP has it dead wrong.
      - johnklos 5y ago
        I don't know if I'd agree that SPARC would've ever been viable. The performance just wasn't there for the price. For instance, my 2002 AlphaServer DS25 with two 1 GHz CPUs runs many workloads noticeably faster than my 2007 Sun Fire V245 with two 1.5 GHz UltraSPARC IIIi CPUs. Also, Macs were never locked down. All Macs can run alternate OSes, from m68k Macs which can still run modern NetBSD without issues, to beige PCI Power Macs, to G3, G4 and G5 Power Macs, to Intel Macs, and now ARM Macs. Notably missing is support for NuBus Power Macs which requires more work than people are willing to do, although older MkLinux was available for them.
- jraph 5y ago
  Pine64's RockPro 64 with 4GB RAM is $80 ($60 for the 2G version) and felt reasonably fast when one day I had to temporarily use it to surf the web. Mind the shipping price and doll fees though. https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/ https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/
netsharc 5y ago
Browser engines need a lot of computing to know what color each pixel of a page needs to be, for each pixel: the typeface affects it, the background image of all the parent elements (in case of transparency) affects it, the CSS positioning of the elements affects it (there could be a white title text, but an annoying cookie popup with a semi-dark background means it needs to be displayed as a greyed out text).
- colechristensen 5y ago
  They really don't though, they could do it just fine in 1995. Browsers have bloated into crazy complex machines though that do way more than rendering some text and graphics. The simple rendering is not why browsers are slow on RPis.
  - leros 5y ago
    HTML is simple. Add CSS and dynamic DOM manipulation and it's whole different situation.
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      The javascript stuff that transformed hypertext documents into fully fledged applications is complicated. HTML and CSS really isn't. It's hard to have an unbiased opinion about what is easy and what is hard for a computer to do. Much of what is done on the web could be 90% as good with 10% of the complexity, but we're buried under too many layers of abstraction, bloat, and "improvement".
  - rwalle 5y ago
    Enough of such comments. Obviously you have never worked much in the front end or the web user experience, and don't understand the complexity or the difficulty of such technologies. Anyone saying "things were fine in 1995" is ignoring how non-interactive, non-intuitive how web pages were, and how much more pleasant it is to look at a web page and get the information today. It is true that some web pages are using unnecessary (or even too much) animations and such and may have a negative effect on user experience or accessibility, but there is no doubt that the web is a better place than it was in 1995. And I'm sorry to say that your personal opinion does not matter, and the web is never going back to 1995.
leros 5y ago
I played around a lot and never got it to improve. I think it's just limited compute resources on the Pi and the fact that web browsers and websites have become massive. It takes a lot to a render a webpage these days. It might have been lack of GPU. Moving windows around the screen was also really painful, probably 1-2 fps render rate as I dragged. I know browsers off-load a lot to GPUs these days too, so that could explain the slow browser rendering.

kcb 5y ago

Yup the Pi 4 is still not there yet. You'd be much better served by something like an off lease sff business desktop. Even things as old as a 2nd Gen Intel Core series CPU will feel significantly better for browsing than a Pi.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dfcab 5y ago

Curious, what mini-desktop pc did you go with?

WithinReason 5y ago
Beelink makes some decent x86 boxes around that price
- dfcab 5y ago

Scramblejams 5y ago

The most painful thing was that it took several seconds to render a website when it's normally instantaneous A ton of that went away for me on my Rpi4 when I switched from sdcard to using a USB NVMe adapter[0] with a decent M.2 SSD in it. And I was using an sdcard recommended for its performance! Try it. It's astonishing how badly that sdcard holds a Pi back in interactive use. [0] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08G14NBCS https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08G14NBCS This one supports trim, which is nice, not all USB M.2 adapters do. I've forgotten a lot of the details from when I researched it, but IIRC if your adapter supports UASP, that's a pretty good indicator of trim support.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Same here. That SD is a huge bottleneck and a reliability Achilles heel as well. Faster cards reduce the bottleneck somewhat, and constant write (videosurveillance) cards reduce the Achilles heel somewhat by increasing time between failure. But only a real SSD fixes both at the same time.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

LeFantome 5y ago

My wife bought a 2008 iMac for $50 but never used it. One day my laptop broke and I put Manjaro Linux on the iMac, hoping I could use it for a few days knowing it would suck. The screen was nice but it only had 6 GB of RAM, a spinning hard drive, and a Core Duo processor. Thing is, I still use it all the time. It is the computer I use most often for Zoom and Teams. Web browsing is very good. I use the latest releases of Firefox, Brave, and Edge. Much of my earlier learning around Docker and Podman was on that iMac. It worked great. I find that older computers work better than underpowered but current stuff, at least with regards to price performance. The one way that old hardware is worse I suppose is in power usage.

nonamenoslogan 5y ago
I'm still using a 2006ish ThinkPad with a CoreDuo in it and only 2Gb of RAM nearly daily, there is still a lot of computing power out there in some of these oldies if one is willing to try.
leros 5y ago
The funny thing about some apps is they enable different strategies based on the hardware available. It's why a Chrome tab will use 1GB of RAM on a beefy machine but also run fine on a a machine with 1GB total RAM.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]