Using Raspberry Pi 3B as a general purpose computer
Last month I put together my Raspberry Pi desktop and tried using it as general purpose computer. Previously I was using my "long in the tooth" Lenovo G480 as main computer.
Now what's changed with Raspberry Pi? Actually not much really. For couple of weeks I was using older Raspbian and it was quite unfulfilling. For video playback there was only OMX Player which did not do windowed playback. Web browsing was bit slower than I liked. And system was not fast. It lagged somewhat.
Then I got latest Raspbian Stretch downloaded. And the difference was between night and day. The desktop is faster. Web browsing is smoother. VLC is provided. Full HD video playback is working. Office is working fine as well. Now, I know the 1GB RAM is actually not a lot. In fact on the Lenovo, with even 2GB RAM, things get creepy crawly after opening 2-3 tabs. So here I'm restricting myself to only 1-2 tabs. And overall it's working fine. One thing that did not work out was NTFS partitions were mounted as read-only. And looks like it's a driver level limitation. Now I have been writing to NTFS partitions successfully since last 2-3 years on desktop linux. So I don't know what the limitation is. Will need to R&D on this. Besides this I did not find any other limitation. Sound works fine over Analog-out and HDMI. The power consumption of this system has to be peanuts. And basically that's all.
Now what's changed with Raspberry Pi? Actually not much really. For couple of weeks I was using older Raspbian and it was quite unfulfilling. For video playback there was only OMX Player which did not do windowed playback. Web browsing was bit slower than I liked. And system was not fast. It lagged somewhat.
Then I got latest Raspbian Stretch downloaded. And the difference was between night and day. The desktop is faster. Web browsing is smoother. VLC is provided. Full HD video playback is working. Office is working fine as well. Now, I know the 1GB RAM is actually not a lot. In fact on the Lenovo, with even 2GB RAM, things get creepy crawly after opening 2-3 tabs. So here I'm restricting myself to only 1-2 tabs. And overall it's working fine. One thing that did not work out was NTFS partitions were mounted as read-only. And looks like it's a driver level limitation. Now I have been writing to NTFS partitions successfully since last 2-3 years on desktop linux. So I don't know what the limitation is. Will need to R&D on this. Besides this I did not find any other limitation. Sound works fine over Analog-out and HDMI. The power consumption of this system has to be peanuts. And basically that's all.
So I can say that with Raspbian Stretch, my goal of using a Raspberry Pi as a lightweight workstation cum go-to desktop is fulfilled.
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