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I could give the Pi 400 to my mother as an entry level desktop and she'd be completely fine. It's not like she needs 500GB of drive space.

by maupin 4y ago

CameronNemo 4y ago
Sure, but flash reliability is not great. SD cards can get hot or jostle, and eMMC can wear out and basically turn the board to ewaste (because replacement of the eMMC later in life of the device is difficult and often not worth it). Beyond that, speeds are much slower than pcie storage.
jancsika 4y ago
Except that the video will freeze sporadically when she tries watching The Staircase on HBO Max. After you go to the trouble of figuring which Chromium startup flags will get a minimally watchable streaming experience, she will then complain that the mouse is broken. When you ask her, "What do you mean the mouse is broken? I didn't touch the mouse," she replies, "I mean it doesn't move when I move it." Then you'll notice that one of your Chromium flags has mysteriously caused sporadic jank for the mouse pointer. And you'll try to explain that it's not broken, there's just some kind of unpredictable latency in the pointer motion. She'll then reply, "Right, it's broken." And you'll stand there, defeated, staring into the frozen eyes of Colin Firth for five straight seconds as you finally begin to comprehend that "entry level desktop" doesn't mean what you thought it did.
- st34m 4y ago
  The Raspberry Pi OS is just not great. I worked with one lately through an education project and was disappointed by the DE and system defaults in a lot of cases. It's definitely not representative of the best that Linux desktops have to offer now.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Very well put. I think it’s the simplicity of it that is deceptive; the RPi and other alternatives work great in experienced hands. In particular when the user can detect any early sign of an issue or is good enough to quickly diagnose what’s going wrong, fix it in 5 min and forget about it, it looks like a cute trivial little cheap machine that just works fine. It takes looking at a kid or less experienced users working through a task for 5~10 mon to realize how much the hardware/software has to be flexible and permissive to make the user successful.
  - jancsika 4y ago
    > the RPi and other alternatives work great in experienced hands. I haven't seen a single piece of evidence that anyone can get Chromium to smoothly stream video under Raspian Bullseye (or any other distro for that matter).

I could give the Pi 400 to my mother as an entry level desktop and she'd be completely fine. It's not like she needs 500GB of drive space.

by maupin 4y ago

I could give the Pi 400 to my mother as an entry level desktop and she'd be completely fine. It's not like she needs 500GB of drive space.

CameronNemo 4y ago

Sure, but flash reliability is not great. SD cards can get hot or jostle, and eMMC can wear out and basically turn the board to ewaste (because replacement of the eMMC later in life of the device is difficult and often not worth it). Beyond that, speeds are much slower than pcie storage.

jancsika 4y ago

Except that the video will freeze sporadically when she tries watching The Staircase on HBO Max. After you go to the trouble of figuring which Chromium startup flags will get a minimally watchable streaming experience, she will then complain that the mouse is broken. When you ask her, "What do you mean the mouse is broken? I didn't touch the mouse," she replies, "I mean it doesn't move when I move it." Then you'll notice that one of your Chromium flags has mysteriously caused sporadic jank for the mouse pointer. And you'll try to explain that it's not broken, there's just some kind of unpredictable latency in the pointer motion. She'll then reply, "Right, it's broken." And you'll stand there, defeated, staring into the frozen eyes of Colin Firth for five straight seconds as you finally begin to comprehend that "entry level desktop" doesn't mean what you thought it did.

st34m 4y ago
The Raspberry Pi OS is just not great. I worked with one lately through an education project and was disappointed by the DE and system defaults in a lot of cases. It's definitely not representative of the best that Linux desktops have to offer now.
makeitdouble 4y ago
Very well put. I think it’s the simplicity of it that is deceptive; the RPi and other alternatives work great in experienced hands. In particular when the user can detect any early sign of an issue or is good enough to quickly diagnose what’s going wrong, fix it in 5 min and forget about it, it looks like a cute trivial little cheap machine that just works fine. It takes looking at a kid or less experienced users working through a task for 5~10 mon to realize how much the hardware/software has to be flexible and permissive to make the user successful.
- jancsika 4y ago
  > the RPi and other alternatives work great in experienced hands. I haven't seen a single piece of evidence that anyone can get Chromium to smoothly stream video under Raspian Bullseye (or any other distro for that matter).