[HN Gopher] Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharin...
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Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharing my theme,
config and some
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 42 points
Date : 2021-07-10 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (raymii.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (raymii.org)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I've been using lxqt on my Pi 400. It's the closest thing to a
| "light" KDE that I can find, and I like it a lot. The only
| problem is that the version on the Raspbian repository is quite
| out of date. You can get a slightly less old version by enabling
| backports. I wish there was a good rolling distribution for the
| Raspberry Pi. openSUSE Tumbleweed is probably the best but it's
| been glitchy for me and I haven't figured out how to netboot it.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| What issues have you had with Arch Linux ARM? I tried it for a
| little while and things seemed to run fairly smoothly (though
| many AUR PKGBUILDs didn't indicate support for ARM).
| bitwize wrote:
| Void Linux, dude! I've been running it on my Pi 2 since
| forever.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I used a Pi 2 as a desktop from 2017 to the end of 2019. Apart
| from using window maker, I didn't made many changes to use it as
| a desktop. Also, since it is an under powered machine by today
| standards, using it as a desktop gave me the feeling of a 90's
| workstation. I even compiled the latest available GTk 1.x version
| and xmms for a better retro feel.
|
| It is possible to use the modern web if you keep the number of
| tabs low and switch heavier sites like gmail to the html mode. An
| ad blocker is needed and Youtube is watchable if you use the
| h264ify extension so it uses the hardware decoder and avoids
| modern video compression codecs.
|
| I could even run libreoffice with Portuguese orthographic and
| grammatical checkers. It is slow, you can't run other tasks
| simultaneously but it works.
|
| Want to watch movies? If it is 1080p or smaller encoded with h264
| it is totally doable. Even streaming in 720p is doable. You won't
| be able to easily watch netflix though.
|
| So, yes a 2GB Pi 2 is good enough for light browsing, light text
| editing, listening to mp3, watching movies and compiling software
| from early 2000's.
|
| Things you can't comfortably do with it: -
| Meetings: encoding and decoding with any codec that is not
| supported by the hardware is just too slow to be usable.
| - Video editing: same as above. Also not enough RAM. -
| Compiling large code bases: libreoffice and mozilla will probably
| fail on anything with less than 8Gb RAM. I could compile OpenCV
| on it, but it took hours. - Keep many tabs open: you
| can if the sites are wikipedia-like. Anything more complex and
| the system starts swapping. Magic Sysrq-f is your friend in such
| situations. - Modern IDE's: no way. Try gnu-nano or
| emacs/vi. Want to develop GUI apps? Use Lazarus-ide. Anjuta+Glade
| probably work stably with recent Gtk+3.x versions. -
| Games: at the time I used it, the driver didn't support desktop
| OpenGL. Emulators for old consoles ran great, emulation station
| ran great, it is possible to run Quake but that is it.
| [deleted]
| prvc wrote:
| >KDE is my desktop environment of choice. KDE5 is rock-solid,
| configurable in any way possible and works great. It treats you
| like a responsible adult instead of a child like GNOME does these
| days, and after XFCE switched to GTK3, the RAM usage is on-par,
| more often than not a bare KDE install (Debian or Arch) uses
| around 300MB ram. This is with Baloo (search indexer) and Akonadi
| (PIM database backend) disabled.
|
| The GNOME Foundation's supposed rationale for removing basic
| functionality from its desktop is to help inexperienced users,
| and international users. However, those are precisely the same
| users who are more likely to have a shortage of computing
| resources. GTK's bloat is really indefensible.
| andrekandre wrote:
| its kind of ironic if you think about it, youd think removing
| features and simplification should allow for more optimization
| not less...
| Syonyk wrote:
| That's not the hard part of using a Pi as a desktop PC...
|
| I've been using them for light to moderate desktop use for years
| now. The important things in desktopping a Pi, as far as I'm
| concerned:
|
| - Fix the storage. The SD card is fine for a toy. It will not
| withstand actual daily use, either in "delivering sane
| performance" or "handling a lot of random writes without dying in
| a year." Get a USB to SSD adapter and a cheap 32GB or 64GB SSD
| from eBay - doesn't have to be fast, doesn't have to be new. It's
| radically better than an SD card in any use case that resembles
| desktop use. You can either boot straight from USB, or, to
| improve compatibility with weird USB to SSD adapters, boot from
| the SD card, mount root from the SSD, and use the SD card for
| swap or something (see below).
|
| - Enable zswap if you're not on a 4GB or 8GB Pi4. It should be a
| module included in the Pi kernel now (I had to argue for a while
| to get it included). This is _not_ zram - this is _zswap._ There
| 's a huge difference. It's a compressed swap system that can
| flush out old or poorly compressible pages to the actual swapfile
| - which, since you're now fronting it with a compressed swap
| region in RAM, can be over on the SD card. The bulk of the stuff
| written to it will never be used again, unless you're just
| massively overcommitting RAM, at which point nothing really will
| help. I think around the 5.x kernels, z3fold starts working,
| though I've not seen a real practical difference between z3fold
| (up to 3 compressed pages per page of RAM) and zbud (only two
| compressed pages), _as long as same filled pages are enabled_ -
| that will crunch a page of 0s down into a "Got it, all 0s,
| done!" note and not bother wasting space compressing it.
|
| - Set the governor to performance. 'sudo cpufreq-set -g
| performance' The stock governor is really bad about ramping up,
| and leads to lag in typing, especially if you're using the
| atrocities that are modern "desktop" apps (Electron). Eventually,
| the system will spin up and do something useful, but you improve
| the performance and responsiveness rather substantially by just
| pinning the cores to their fastest speed and letting them stay
| there. I'm sure there's some measurable power difference doing
| this if you're concerned about the absolute lowest power, but
| it's not substantial, and "race to idle" solves a lot. If you're
| using a Pi as a desktop, try it - you'll like the change.
|
| - Use adblockers. It's amazing how much CPU time the internet
| spends on stuff that is advertising, tracking, and generally
| evil. Most websites behave a lot better once you remove that
| garbage.
|
| Otherwise... once you've done that, they're actually quite
| capable little systems! The Pi4 with 4GB or 8GB is the best
| option right now, and for most people I'm not sure the 8GB really
| gains you much - I have one, use it fairly heavily, and rarely
| see any RAM pressure past about 4GB. But it does make up for some
| slow disk.
|
| I've written about some of this more extensively over on my blog
| over the years, if anyone wants more details - link is in my
| profile.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| With the Compute Module 4 and certain boards, you can use (and
| even boot from) NVMe SSDs natively. Makes a world of difference
| for so many things!
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(page generated 2021-07-10 23:00 UTC)