dailying a raspberry pi 4b

November 6, 2023

tl;dr

don’t

why not?

• after the case, SD/SSD drive, charger, etc.. it’s marginally cheaper than a budget mini-pc
• even with overclocking, it’s slow
  • slow as in, “a computer from 15 years ago with the 15 years of fragmentation and limewire viruses” slow
• ymmv with any distro that isn’t Raspberry Pi OS. Fedora 38 took a long time to boot and the GUI didn’t work
• i’m assuming the second 4k60 HDMI port is in case the first one breaks because anything more than 1080p30 and you’re noticably missing frames/stuttering.
• workflow of queueing multiple sites or videos in tabs will test your patience
• wifi speeds are inconsistent. Pixel 6a records 400Mb/s while Pi will top out at 70Mb/s (and takes a while to ramp up to that number)

still want it?

• 4GB memory is probably enough. you’ll be hard press to get above that without system freezing
• it’s still usable. can run:
  • vim + some plugins
  • terminator
  • zsh + powerline
• not great but the new Bookworm os has been better in my experience:
  • it makes firefox a first class citizen
  • note, you should update ~/.config/wayfire.ini now.
• stock up on tea/coffee if you’re using rust
• python is fine
  • not entirely sure why but i had to include PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 for pipenv to work it seems i installed the non-utf8 version of en_CA. lesson learned, don’t be patriotic. note, i had to reinstall postgresql (because it was easier than figuring out how to change it to utf-8)
  • i had to rename /etc/_pip.conf as the https://www.piwheels.org/simple would give conflicting packages.

revisions

• 2023-11-08: update why i was getting encoding error and spell raspberry properly