I’m considering buying a Raspberry Pi 400.
I know it’s a small computer, it’s basically got cell phone-style specs (“4gb of RAM; Broadcom BCM2711; Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC”).
Linux doesn’t need a lot of computer to run, however.
It may surprise people who are reading this, but until 2016 I was routinely using an AMD Sempron 3000+, a wimpy mobile processor based on AMD’s K7 microarchitecture. And when I say WIMPY, I mean WIMPY, even by 2004 standards.
It came with Windows XP and 512 MB of RAM. I later upgraded to 1 GB. I thought it may run Windows Vista because it said “Windows Vista Capable” on it.
When the CD arrived from Compaq (HP), it took Windows Vista over 6 minutes to start, it barely moved at all, and the laptop was like the surface of the sun hot trying to run it. It had no Vista drivers, and you were just supposed to keep using XP drivers for everything.
Microsoft had no idea what kind of a machine Vista would even take when they started having hardware partners put the stickers on, it kept getting delayed and more bloated.
They just didn’t want their hardware partners to have unsold stock or scream that they couldn’t sell computers because Vista was coming, like the next George R.R. Martin novel, with dragons.
Windows XP had always ran fine, but by this point I moved the entire thing over to Mandriva Linux and GNOME 2.x. Which ran well enough.
Eventually, Linux got too fat, or at least the major desktops, and GNOME 3 was basically Vista all over again as in, I couldn’t run it on that laptop. I ended up moving it to smaller and smaller desktops until finally I was with Crunchbang Linux.
But by this point, everything ran fine again because there were huge applications and window managers like GNOME’s Mutter that wanted so much RAM that they couldn’t possibly be satisfied due to bloat, and leaks that GNOME didn’t care about.
(Also, there’s no point arguing about bugs and leaks in GNOME, because everyone in Red Hat circles will flame and lie about you, like they did to Richard Stallman, and to me on IRC. They will come up with any vicious lie to avoid having to discuss their stinking mess on a technical level, so all you can really do is use different software anyway if GNOME is bothering you.)
Anyway, my point is, that with less software bloat, you can get away with running a small computer.
There’s several openSUSE options that you can deploy easily to an SD card and then run on the Pi.
There are also operating systems whose entire purpose is to just load retro gaming console emulators, which have no other software in the way at all. You leave Linux and enter these by shutting it down and swapping cards, apparently.
I briefly stopped to look at some of the other “offerings”. Microsoft has a “Windows IoT Core” which apparently is useless without a x86 PC running Windows, because IoT Core is some gimpy thing that’s not a general purpose OS.
But one of the reasons you’d buy a Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer is that it’s a self-contained computer, this one with a keyboard case and ports, that does not have the UEFI firmware and Windows and x86, to begin with.
UEFI is malware. It’s a stinking pile of malware, and so are the other two.
The PC has been vandalized, and so has Linux on the PC, by Microsoft and their enablers.
Furthermore, Intel and AMD are committing, essentially, anti-consumer fraud by benchmarking horribly insecure CPUs and then declaring they have chip bugs that need plugged, and there goes all of your performance anyway, after you bought the thing at inflated prices, figuring it would be a monster that would handle anything you threw at it, and then Intel sabotages it and takes 30% of your performance away with microcode updates and operating system workarounds.
These hacks for chipset bugs hit Windows users too. The deterioration of quality in x86 was one reason Apple played around with AMD chips internally for a while, determined that they were almost as bad, and switched to ARM.
My other option to get off x86 would be the Mac, but those are expensive and unwieldy.
I’m also not sure if it’s possible to delete Mac OS to free up all the storage for Linux, like I do to Windows.
I do really wonder why the Pi has not been enhanced with at least 8 GB of RAM.
I saw someone on YouTube browsing around on Chromium and playing YouTube, so I do know it can do this.
Modern browsers, like Chrome and Firefox, are very poorly designed, and they’re excessively bloated with features that most people don’t even need which open up the computer to all sorts of security vulnerabilities.
I don’t really need some gargantuan thing like Firefox (or anything based on it) monopolizing the whole computer, which is basically where I wound up near the end with the Sempron with 1 GB of RAM. Eventually there was just not enough operating system left to cut and if you opened up more than one or two Firefox tabs you were in serious trouble (Even with NoScript)
Let’s just say that’s not a place I want to be again.
Chromebooks have about 4 GB at best, I think, usually, but they work around it with tricks (like zram and suspending tabs you’re not looking at), and this is sort of what keeps them cheap.
Otherwise modern browsers make no effort to even try to contain the mess.
I’ve been using NetSurf somewhat on the side. Humorously, given how much I despise Flatpak, that’s where it’s from.
(I never said I don’t use any. I said it’s a lousy way to package what should be OS components.)
NetSurf isn’t bloated, so it’s inherently fast, but you have to sort of lower your expectations if you’re a “Web App” person.
Lurking Old Reddit works. Reading Wikipedia works. A lot of news sites work, and since the (prototype) JavaScript is off by default, a lot of the browsing is just really quiet and fairly pleasant, even if things do look a bit odd.
I’m pretty sure I could use this for some of my browsing to contain the “Firefox (LibreWolf) is sitting there using 4 GB of RAM” issues, but like, that’s all the RAM you’ve got on this machine. Mozilla is a real trash can from top to bottom.
They ran Brendan Eich out on a rail, mainly because he was holding back the adoption of Digital Restrictions Malware and other Chromeisms so someone trawled a small political donation he made and drummed him out of camp.
(The funny thing is that Brave Software (his new browser company) has lots of gay employees and I’m sure he’s aware.)
I feel like lately 90% of my computing is trying to put a lid on the garbage when it’s so full you have to stand on top of it to make it go down.
It’s not even the rest of the OS I have my doubts about with 4 GB of RAM, it’s goddamn Firefox.
I feel that Microsoft is probably buzzing around trying to limit the number of users who can abandon the PC disaster for a working ARM-based system. Again, if the Pi just had 8 GB I’d live with it. You could even get it to $119 and it would be a steal.
Why do I smell Microsoft buzzing around?
Well, they did corrupt the “official” Pi OS with enabled repos full of their garbage, and they did port that useless Windows “thing” to it.
It’s not as bad as when they ported Windows XP to the One Laptop Per Child project and ruined that.
The computer was supposed to run on a hand crank if you didn’t have reliable access to power. It was meant for school kids in third world countries. They were suffering enough without Windows XP, certainly.
I feel that if you had a faster stock clock speed on the Pi and double the RAM, many Windows users would go pouring for the exit. From what I’m reading, it’s basically dead easy to drop any number of operating system images on an SD card for this thing and swap between them.
4 GB of RAM used to be a hell of a lot of RAM. That was before modern programmers, who wouldn’t know good code if it bit them on the ass.
That’s the most accurate in the Windows world, where things were unreliable and flakey 20 years ago, but now they hit people with OS killers every month and they can’t prevent them from being installed or even ask what the update is.
Since Fedora has a lot of bugs and wants to go “git-like images for OS binaries” with rpm-ostree, I got out before more shit hit the fan. They don’t just have a lot of bugs, they want to revive the bugs they had in 2008.
So this is definitely an OS not to put on the Pi. They don’t even care what it does on x86 PC anymore.
So I’m sure the Fedora Asahi Spin for the ARM Macs will just go swimmingly.
Anyway, I’m going to look more into the Pi and may go down to pick one up at the end of the week.
It would be nice to have something that didn’t reek of Wintel and made computers interesting again, like when you could toss a Commodore in your cart at the K-Mart. ⬆