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So in an attempt to reduce some power consumption when doing computer things, and because I'm bored and have nothing better to do, I decided to try replacing my main gaming computer with a raspberry pi, at least for light computing tasks, like looking at social media, watching Youtube, all that good stuff.
A quick recap for those unfamiliar with the Raspberry Pi, it is a small, "single board" computer, designed to be cheap, yet resourceful, being the core of many projects, such as game emulators, media centers, many different server applications, robots, all sorts of stuff. Even a desktop computer, if you're desperate enough.
I very quickly remembered why I haven't made an attempt at this in a very long time.
My Pi model is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 4 gigs of ram, overclocked to about 2 gigahertz on the CPU and 850 megahertz on the GPU, and my OS is Ubuntu Mate. I tried vanilla Ubuntu, and it was a terrible experience, do not do that. In fact, maybe don't try what I'm doing at all, for the sake of your sanity.
For a few things that I do, it's perfectly fine. It handles Spacehey and, to a decent extent, Tumblr just fine. And seeing as I don't play too many games on PC anymore, that's not a concern either.
Where it sort of starts to fall apart is things like Youtube and Discord. Youtube is acceptable, it just can't handle 60 FPS video. Whatever, I can live with 30 FPS, I've been a console gamer for all my life anyway.
Discord is another strange thing altogether. There is no native Discord client for Raspberry Pi, as the Pi is built on a different platform than a standard desktop computer or laptop. I instead had to use an app called "Webcord"
I always joked about electron apps, specifically Discord, literally just being the web app version disguised as a desktop app. Well, at least the electron apps had some sort of functionality that made it worthwhile to use.
Webcord is literally just Chrome stripped down to do nothing but Discord as far as I can tell, without any of the features offered in the desktop app. But it works, and it's not like this thing could handle streaming anyway, so who cares.
Overall, for what I typically use computers for nowadays, this thing ain't too bad. I do have one of the more powerful models, and I had to overclock it to get any decent results to begin with, but oh well, small details.
Is it the perfect desktop experience? No, not in the slightest.
Am I gonna continue to be a stubborn bitch and continue to use it as such regardless? Yes, I am.
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JillTheSomething
Stubborn bitch time!
I will take a slice of this Pi and nothing will stop me!
by Robotic Gunner; ; Report