Fun with Pi

There have been a number of interesting things happening in the Raspberry Pi community lately.

One new hotness is the RPi 4 with 8Gig of RAM, which in addition to having more RAM than you will likely ever need on a machine like this, also has a slightly updated power module that improves the behavior with some USB-C power supplies. It does mean that you can now open too many Chromium tabs to keep track of on this platform too. 😛

Another interesting update is the support for booting off of USB drives, instead of the MicroSD card. This lets you use an SSD over USB3 as your main drive, which is both much faster than the built-in MicroSD, and will have a significantly longer lifespan.

Finally, there is the 64-bit version of Raspian (now renamed as Raspberry Pi OS), which actually matters given you can get a Pi with more than 32bits of address space, but it will likely also improve performance for many tasks once the beta kinks are ironed out.

Anyway, being the RPi geek that I am, here is my latest desktop…

An 8Gig RPi4 with a 500Gig Samsung SSD, in the awesome Argon ONE Pi 4 case, which has both a temperature controlled fan (that is almost always off under normal workloads) and, believe it or not, a working power button that does a safe shutdown! This is definitely the slickest Pi case I’ve used, even if moving all the ports to the back meant making it nearly 50% larger than the Flirc case, which was my previous favorite.

Anyway, even with an SSD that cost more than the Pi and the Argon ONE case together, and the Pi overclocked to 2GHz, it’s still too slow to be a great desktop experience, but it works well enough that I was able to write this post, while watching youtube videos, with several other apps open, including LibreOffice and Gimp, so it’s definitely real.