Episode: 3212
Title: HPR3212: A Pi Model 3B as your daily driver? You must be joking.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3212/hpr3212.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:56:07

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3212 for Tuesday, 24th of November 2020.
Today's show is entitled, A Pi Model 3B at Your Daily Driver.
You must be joking.
It is hosted by Beemer and is about 13 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summer is Beemer's laptop in a way being fixed.
Can he manage for a few days using just his Raspberry Pi 3B?
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Hello there HBR.
This is Beezer again.
The laptop I use as my daily driver is a Dell Inspiron.
I've had it for at least seven years and other than the battery life drop into about 10 minutes,
it's been absolutely thoughtless.
Recently the fans started making lot of noise which I knew from past experience,
usually means that the bearings failing.
So the solution is just to replace the fan.
Nansom laptops to reach the fan requires a lot of disbanding which can be very
fiddly with clumsy hands like mine.
So a range for a friend is a bit of an electronics note to fix it for me.
While the Dell was away, the question arose of which computer to use in its place.
The rather than just use one of the other laptops, it struck me as an opportunity to
conduct some of my theorize about for ages.
That is, can you use the Raspberry Pi as your primary computer?
Clearly this depends on what you use your computer for and for some people you don't need to
conduct an experiment as the answer is obviously that you can't.
If you're a gamer or you're into a video editing, a Pi falls along way short.
What though if you're a light user doing a bit of internet browsing, webmail and YouTube,
could a Pi plus a cheap USB key, board and an else plugged into a second-hand monitor
and an old TV be enough to meet your needs?
I wasn't going to be making it easy for the Pi as mine is not a model 4, even a 3B plus.
It's a plain model 3B. I always use it connected to a 24-inch Samsung monitor
with a mouse and keyboard occupying two of the four USB sockets.
It already had a copy of where I was being installed for about a year ago.
Now this had a reasonable fit of software like numeric for spreadsheets and adiword
word processing. These are considered a bit outdated but in actual fact they still do a perfectly
good job for simple office and admin tasks and the browse was Firefox ESR edition I believe.
Now in the search for optimal results I decided to replace this with the current version of
the desktop software. I considered Ubuntu Marta but there's a warning on the download page that
suggests it kind of works on the 3B. Now I suppose it's not unreasonable the Ubuntu Marta team
have tuned the distribution to a more powerful model 4.
Instead I decided to go for the latest version of Rails View which has now been rebranded
Raspberry Pi OS. I don't know the image from Raspberry Pi website using a Torrem and then installed
it on a 16GB micro SD card. The boot time is very quick. We'll under 30 seconds. The default
desktop is simple with number of the compositing effects that we are used to with heavier desktop
managers. So a certain amount of customization of the user interface is possible such as the
title bar color, highlight color and the system from it and you can change this to all papers so
while you can't craft the appearance as fine as with KDE, Cinnamon or XFCE I think most people could
come up with something they can live with. I decided I'll start with a default applications and
only install anything else as and when my workflow required it. So I didn't do a side by side
comparison with last year's version of Rails View and so the only obvious differences I could see
was that numeric nabby word had been replaced by LibreOffice. Given the considerable
additional functionality the LibreOffice applications must be heavier. So I was interested to see
how they perform. Also the default browse was now chromium. Of that it looked pretty much the same
as before. So how use what is the Pi Model 3 as a daily driver? Well I'll take you through the
task I tried to perform. I started off with a bit of web browsing. Now chromium opens quickly
and signing into my hotmail account was only a little slower than I'm used on my regular.
My inbox has got hundreds of items in it but scrolling through was no problem.
Though perhaps a little slower than I'm used to but it's not a problem though.
I tried to open up the online versions of Excel and Word which come as part of our live.com
subscription but these were a non-starter and I mean that literally. I tried to open a spreadsheet
stored on my one drive that is about 350 rows and it just locked up the browser.
Now don't allow noting a copy of this same spreadsheet and opening a LibreOffice
LibreOffice account this could have been more different. It opened quickly and I could navigate
around it easily. YouTube videos play fine with a nice sharp image which I know is no longer
jerky and slightly I've synced with the audio which is what I got with last year's Razbian.
Forget about getting full screen though. The image remains watchable just about but the audio
sync is lost and returning from full screen to a normal viewport takes forever.
Watching a YouTube video clearly takes up a lot of the available power in the Pi3
as anything you may try to do at the same time whether in another browser tab or a complete
separate application runs very slow or not at all. Audio is different matter though. I could
listen to a radio station in one tab while working on email in another or typing into a LibreOffice
document. As I alluded to before LibreOffice works surprisingly well I didn't try any really
large documents or any with loads of embedded pictures but for general use the performance
absolutely fine. What I had real problems with though was printing. With Ubuntu on my Intel
paled Dell I don't think I've had to do anything to get it to recognise my HP printer scanner
as long as it's plugged into a USB socket it's just there automatically. Not so with the Pi
I installed cups and the HP specific HP lip utility and followed all the other advice I could
find online but it was all to no avail after spending an hour or so and now I just gave up.
It is sprawling the menus I found the Raspberry Pi diagnostics utility. Now one of the test
it can perform is an SD card performance analyser. The idea behind this is to tell you if the SD
card you've installed the operating system on is likely to be a performance bottleneck due to
slow read or write speeds. It strikes me a bit late to do that by the time the OS has already been
installed but it still makes for an interesting test. My car was apparently below the recommended
minima but it seemed to be performing okay as far as I was concerned. What it does imply though is
that a higher spec SD card will presumably deliver better results than just the largely satisfactory
ones that I was experiencing. Again on the multimedia front I tried watching the TV programme using
the iPlayer facility on the BBC website. Both recorded and light TV programmes worked really
well though it was very much better using the default image size. Going full-screen resulted
in a degraded image quality and a jerky delivery. I listened to a lot of online radio and
networks extreme will either coming through the browser via streamer or by entering a stream URL
into VLC. Either way the audio reproduction is really first class using headphones connected to
the 3.5 jack in the side of the pie. My monitor has an audio socket in the back so you can feed
the audio into it via the HDMI cable. There really isn't much difference but I do feel that the
direct audio jack possibly just as the edge over the HDMI output but that's just subjective.
Having tried YouTube, Hotmail, iPlayer and worked on some documents and spreadsheets for
LibroFace. I'd already covered a fair chunk of my daily workflow all of which could be accomplished
without installing any extra software. I do from time to time do a bit of video editing which I
use open shot but that's far from part of my daily routine so I wasn't going to attempt to do
that in the pie. I do a fair bit of audio editing though using the sounds captured mainly on the
Zoom H2 handheld recorder. I'm not a big fan of audacity. I must prefer a simpler lightweight
or it's the called MH wave edit. I installed this on the pie using Synaptic and was astonishing
at how quick it was. It was slower than my Dell laptop for sure but only a bit. The only real
difference was with the time taken to save a file. The actual processing was remarkably quick.
Next time I installed the sound converter application to turn the default wave files into MP3's
now this ran considerably more slowly on used to but by no means at the extent that I would be
putting off using it I just needed to be a little bit more patient. With last part of the test
I really felt I was pushing my luck. I decided to try a bit of photo editing using GIMP.
Again using Synaptic I installed version 2.10 and imported the 10 megapixel photo of about 5 megabytes
size and tried to make some changes to the color balance and saturation. It was a little bit
on the slow side but wasn't this archery slow. To touch up a few photos now and then would not be a
big issue in my view but I think if you had a large batch it might present a bit of a problem if
you're in a hurry. So well my conclusions. Well I've got to be honest that I expected the notion
of a Pi3 as a desktop substitute to be unrealistic but for somebody with anything beyond the
most modest of these I think that's probably still true. However as a standby for emergencies
just so you can keep up with your email than the news it does the trick. I think also for
grandma who's not interested in computers at all but just wants to be able to do a supermarket
order online or send the occasional email it would do fine. The biggest single surprised to me was
how well the office worked. I created several large occupants while at the same time listening to
internet radio in good quality stereo. The best on the responsiveness I could have been using my
regular Dell. I've no doubt that the problem I encountered trying to get the printer recognised
could be resolved I just didn't have the patience or the need to spend any more time on it.
Video via YouTube the BBC IR player and a couple of other streaming services I tried
was also surprisingly good as long as you stuck with a default viewport size. With a supplied
version of Chromium though it's not possible to view DRM protected content so that restricts
what you can watch though it's not a limitation of the hardware of course. The important thing to
remember with the Pi3 is that it's very light on resources you can have three or four static pages
open and browse and no problem and you can run a couple of less demanding applications concurrently
without locking one another out. But if you want to do anything else though especially where video
or graphics are concerned it's best not to try to run anything else at the same time.
The bottom line is that this experiment was run with a suboptimal microSD card using one of the
lowest powered Pi models and it's still delivered up to a point. It's not difficult to imagine that
a high spec Pi4 is going to take care of all the performance shortcomings other than perhaps in
the areas of video editing and top-end gaming. I was going to finish it at this point but there's
a stop press. Today, 2nd of November a brand new Pi model has been announced. It's the Pi400
which seems to be a Pi4 with much needed heatsink built into a keyboard make yourself contain unit.
This is surely ended precisely the market I've been addressing namely turning a Pi4 into a
desktop substitute. Maybe the Pi400 will become the desktop counterpart to the PiBrook Pro.
I think the world of unpowered computers in the consumer market is about to get very interesting.
Bye for now.
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