The Raspberry Pi is a cheap, credit card sized Single Board Computer (SBC) that can run various flavors of Linux. Frequently they are used by makers for DIY projects that require a microprocessor, or recommended for people learning basic electronics or programming. I’ve had an old one running the open-source “pi-hole” software on my home network to block ads and trackers for a couple of years.
The Raspberry Pi 4B is the latest model, and brought some impressive advances in processor speed and RAM offerings. The Raspberry Pi Foundation even sells a model integrated into a keyboard, indicating that they believe it can be used as a basic desktop computer.
I have a Pi 4B that I’m intending to make into a thermal camera, and a friend who is working on the same project forwarded me some “challenges” where people attempted to use the Pi as their only computer for a week or more. I thought that it would be interesting to try out myself.
I’m always interested in saving money, and the Raspberry Pi allows one to save on two fronts: the low initial purchase price, as well as the ridiculously low power consumption of between 3 and 5 watts. Could I use it as my only PC?
Setting expectations
I was prudently expecting not to be blown away by the performance of the Pi when running a desktop environment. My 4B has a quad-core ARM processor with a maximum clock rate of 1.8 GHz, and 4 GB of RAM. That’s weaker than most smartphones produced in the past five years.
For example, it’s not going to play any games (other than emulating stuff like old NES titles), but I was curious if it could provide an acceptable experience for basic productivity tasks. Things like using the web browser, checking email, and some light office work, which I suspect would fit the use case of the vast majority of people.
Generally, it seems like many people buy way more computing power than they need for their use case. I know a ton of people who spend $2k+ on a MacBook Pro and don’t do any photo editing, video editing, or gaming on it, using it only to surf the web and edit office documents. It’s like buying a Porsche but never pressing the accelerator more than a quarter of the way down or going over 65 MPH.
My day-by-day with the Pi 4B
Day 1: Setup
In the evening, I flashed the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (based on Debian Linux) to my microSD card using Raspberry Pi Imager. It’s an easy task and I’ve done this several times in the past.
I plugged in my mouse, keyboard, monitor, and power supply and the Pi booted within 20 seconds. I clicked through the prompts to set my time zone and language preferences, and was then sent to the desktop environment. Basic software was already installed, including the Chromium web browser.
The web browser launched in a couple of seconds and was a bit slower when rendering pages than my desktop. But it was by no means a bad experience.
I watched a YouTube video to test the Pi’s media capabilities. The video played perfectly at 720p, but when I pushed the resolution to 1080p the Pi started dropping about a third of the frames. The video was watchable, but not enjoyable. I poked around online and it seemed to be a common observation of the Pi’s limitations, with no real solution offered. Users who overclocked the Pi’s GPU reported little improvement.
Day 2: Syncing my files
Many cloud providers don’t have native Linux apps, so users must use the open-source rclone software in order to mount and sync their cloud storage. It’s a must-have for my files to sync across my desktop, laptop, and phone, and provides great insurance against a hard drive failure.
After some tinkering I got my Google Drive to mount automatically on system start, and I made a bash script to sync any changed files before logging off. Checking 1200 files took about 20 seconds.
It took me about an hour to get rclone working and replicate the functionality that one obtains in a minute or two from running the Google Drive installer on Windows or MacOS.
Day 3: Web-embedded Unity overwhelms the Pi
A training course that I had to do for work had a Unity player embedded in a webpage. The loading bar slowly inched along, then crashed my browser right before rendering the environment, multiple times. Oops. I had to swap to my desktop tower to get this done.
Later in the evening, I was able to install and configure the ARM64 version of Obsidian and get some writing done, then sync my files back to the cloud.
Day 4: My eyes hurt
Last night I noticed that my eyes were irritated when using my computer after dark. I normally use f.lux on my desktop to automatically shift my screen to a warmer color palette at night, creating less blue light and reducing eye strain. It’s one of those nice quality of life things that you hardly notice until it’s gone.
F.lux isn’t available for ARM64. A similar program called Redshift is, which I installed. Redshift appeared to install successfully, however the command to adjust the color temperature of my display was failing. Apparently the display driver on Raspberry Pi OS does not support gamma correction, so I was out of luck unless I wanted to mess around with trying to install my own display driver.
Also irritating me was that my 1440p 144Hz monitor appeared to be capped to a 60Hz refresh rate. This was primarily evident when scrolling on webpages, which was much less smooth than I was accustomed to. I tried a few suggestions for forcing a higher refresh rate and none of them were successful.
Day 5: I’ve reached the end of my patience with the Pi
This morning I needed to print something and leave the house with it on a one hour notice. Was the Pi up to the task? Apparently I would need to install and configure a program called CUPS to get my printer working. I didn’t really feel like spending the time to do that, and it was reasonable that if I had to troubleshoot the installation that it might take more than an hour to print my document.
Instead I unplugged the Pi, swapped to my desktop and had my document printed in a minute, and used the rest of the time I saved to go do something else.
So could you use the Raspberry Pi as your only computer?
Probably, if you were forced to by financial circumstances, or are in some off-grid situation where every watt counts.
My desktop computer consumes about 70 watts on average doing typical tasks, and the Pi was consuming about 4 watts. This is a cost difference of 1.65 cents per hour at my electricity rates. I would have to use the Pi as my primary computer for over 3,000 hours just to have it pay for itself via the electricity savings.
There’s probably a way to bend most of your workflow to fit the Pi’s limitations; after all it’s not that I couldn’t get my printer set up, but rather that spending a bunch of time tinkering to get simple things working had already stopped being fun.
But it would by no means be an enjoyable computing experience to be a full-time Raspberry Pi user. And I believe that’s primarily because…
Desktop Linux is still a chore in 2023
I ran Linux as my primary operating system for a couple of years in college. Eventually I got annoyed with it and went back to Windows. Oftentimes, doing something that would be incredibly quick in Windows or MacOS just becomes a time-consuming chore in Linux.
I could wipe my Windows desktop right now and have mostly everything reinstalled and reconfigured the way I like it in 45 minutes. Meanwhile, on Linux it feels as though I’m spending most of my time figuring out how to set up or troubleshoot my workflow, when that time could have been spent actually getting things done.
Every couple of years I get annoyed with something in Windows and go install a Linux distro again to see if the user experience has improved. The free and open-source nature of Linux really appeals to me philosophically. But all of those experiments have resulted in me slinking back to Windows and telling myself “at least I can finally get something done today instead of spending two hours troubleshooting drivers or configurations.”
For my Raspberry Pi, it’s back to the project drawer. There’s something to be said for efficiency of time and quality of life features — rather than just resource efficiency — and it’s mainly for those reasons that the Pi won’t be replacing my desktop.