Raspberry Pi Desktop Replacement - One Week - Yes...this was edited with the Pi

the raspberry pi is a brilliant little device i mean even in a pretty decent sized case it's still relatively small and we all know how much of an awesome maker board it is i've even made it into a home server on this channel before so it definitely has potential and as we've seen over the years their officially supported operating system formerly raspbian now raspberry pi os has turned more and more into an actual working desktop operating system so that begs the question can you actually daily drive a raspberry pi for an extended period of time well unfortunately that's what i'm here to find out and for the next seven days i will be daily driving this raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte version let me know down in the comments how you think this is going to go [Music] okay so the raspberry pi i'm using is the raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte version just to give me as much of a chance as reasonably possible i'm using the argon one case which connects a uh m.2 sata drive and lets me boot off of it so again giving me the best kind of chance of having a decent operating system or desktop experience i'll be running the 64-bit version of raspberry pi os i've previously messed around with running ubuntu desktop on the raspberry pi and i just didn't really have a great experience it seems like things that are supported on native ubuntu don't necessarily translate well to the raspberry pi and when you're looking up things for the raspberry pi a lot of times it comes up in raspberry pi os which doesn't always translate well to ubuntu so i'm sticking with raspberry pi os so let me clarify one thing i'm obviously not saying you should use a raspberry pi as a desktop replacement nobody in the history of the world has ever suggested that for the price of this setup right here which is probably around 100 120 maybe even more you can get a pretty decent desktop system off of craigslist or ebay that'll be miles better than this but we're doing it just to see if we can do it and maybe learn something along the way so this is day one all i want to do today is get everything set up configured kind of test out the basics web browsing checking emails you know how fast it is how snappy it is just regular use cases so that's what we're gonna do let's hook it up so i will be using this 4k monitor i don't anticipate running this in 4k i'll probably drop it down to 1080p but that's the idea okay so here we are in raspberry pi os 64-bit and i've done a couple of things i've installed the argon script to get the fan working i've lowered the resolution to 1080p uh gives it a much better experience 1080p at 60 versus 4k at 30. i've tested around basic web browsing functionality and initial impressions are basically you know those dreams that people have where you're running from something and it just feels like you're trying to run fast but you're actually running super slow that's that's what this feels like in comparison to an actual desktop machine or one that i'm used to so so i have all my bookmarks reset up because in chromium google cut out the functionality to be able to sign into your gmail account or google account to be able to link everything and transfer over all the bookmarks and settings so youtube playback i know that's one of the biggest issues we've seen a lot when people use raspberry pi is desktop replacement it's video playback it's honestly not terrible let's watch mr beast's ridiculous squid game video so you can see like it just takes a little while to do almost everything so as you can see i mean that loaded up pretty quickly so here we are in 720p and we are getting some pretty decent playback i mean i don't see many dropped frames at all it's pretty smooth which probably is just a testament to raspberry pi os updates i believe recently they said they were working on video playback especially in web browsing and youtube so pretty solid i mean for a week i can live with 720p uh youtube playback for sure if we get a full screen and turn on stats for nerds we can see how much we're actually dropping so up here we can see we are running at 720p uh 24 fps and 144 145 frames dropped out of 3000 it doesn't look like it's going up very much at all it's sticking at 145 so pretty smooth playback outside of full screen let's just browse some web pages let's pull up a bunch of different tabs see how it reacts let's try twitch let's open up my discord shameless plug if you haven't joined the discord uh feel free to join link is in the description below but yeah you can just tell everything is just slower and it reminds me of when i was younger back in the 90s when you know this was normal for a computer and how fast uh you expected it to go so uh ptsd flashbacks i guess but so far usable definitely usable obviously it's not going to be as fast as a normal computer but um i don't have many plans for today day one i just want to get everything set up and ready to go over the course of this week i'm going to be testing regular office work so like spreadsheets word documents i want to test if i can game on it what type of games i can realistically play on here i want to test some type of development work so any type of coding you want to do the big ones are going to be this entire video that you're watching has been edited off of this raspberry pi so if you're looking at this and the quality sucks and it's not as good as my other videos that's because this entire video was edited directly off of the raspberry pi as well as the thumbnail was edited on the raspberry pi as well so everything for this video raspberry pi but that's day one those are my ideas i will see you tomorrow oh okay day two and um while this is booting up let's recap day one or at least talk about my thoughts so day one obviously was just installing raspberry pi os and doing the basic web browsing stuff after i stopped filming i pretty much spent the rest of the day watching lsu vs texas a m hanging out on discord watching youtube nothing too crazy and it was a decent experience so can't complain the installation process for raspberry pi and linux in general is so much better than windows windows you know takes a lot longer you know you're going through a process they have to ask you you know your name your email address your mom's maiden name complimenting you on your green shirt pretty much creeping you out getting as much details from you as possible linux raspberry pi is like here you go so day two what are we gonna do the idea for day two is to do office tasks or basic work tasks so bed involves spreadsheets word documents uh answering and replying to emails uh maybe some zoom calls that's what we're gonna do today and i know what you're thinking office tasks should be easy you can just use you know the google suite like google sheets google documents or you can use office 365 for microsoft and get all the words and excels and blah blah blah but yes while you can do that um what happens if you don't have internet and you want to work offline so we're going to use some native softwares for linux and see if they work on the raspberry pi and if they do how well they work so that's the idea let's check it out okay so i found a list here 17 best apps to use uh it's a weird number but for email we're gonna try this we're gonna try thunderbird uh bringing it down a visual studio code while we're at it for development work and for office we're going to try the libre office so let's see how that goes okay so we installed libre office one of my favorite things about linux and obviously the raspberry pi is installing software so much easier i've added it and it looks like there's a bunch of different things uh libreoffice base which is like databases so i guess that's like microsoft access calc looks like excel draw is what like paint or something impress is powerpoint math is i don't i don't know um and writer i guess is like word so i guess let's try out the excel variant and see what that's all about okay so right off the bat i mean it looks like excel for sure but from like uh windows xp or something so i put an actual excel document out here on my network share and let's see if we can actually open up excel documents in here if we can that would be cool oh wow so you can you can straight up open excel documents in here okay that makes things interesting so now we have a regular slx folder or file so then i can go over here and be like this equals uh this uh we're actually just doing cat can we do a concat um cat yep i mean it works like excel so cool let's try out the others okay so here we are in libre writer and we are seeing a theme here in terms of ui it's basically late 90s early 2000s and it's basically a boost of nostalgia right to the dome if you weren't born by that time then consider this a time machine so yeah it looks like old uh microsoft word so again we're going to test i have uh let's refresh this okay so similar to the excel test we have a doc and a docx file let's drag them in see if they work here's the doc file yup and it worked that's uh impressive so all your doc files will work let's create a new and try docx i assume it's going to work uh maybe not okay so it looks like doc works but doc x doesn't work which isn't really a huge deal i don't think uh some of you that are more used to working with microsoft word let me know if that's actually a big deal but it doesn't appear that doc x works with libreoffice writer but hey not bad so i mean it's just like microsoft word if you're used to using that then i'm sure you could get used to using this it's not as pretty but who cares yeah i don't really know what else to test i mean [Music] yep you could change colors yep you can do pretty much it looks like a whole bunch of stuff add symbols line breaks page numbers headers footers pictures tables it has spell check so it doesn't like boy it suggests boo let's go with that yeah microsoft word replacement okay so you get the point here i'm not going to go through all the libre office programs that's not really what this video is about the basics excel in microsoft word showing that you can take those files that you were previously working on windows and if you switch to a raspberry pi you could import those into libreoffice and work with them just as you would on windows kind of next we're gonna move on to uh thunderbird client and see how that handles email okay so i'm in thunderbird and uh kind of following a trend here with these softwares looks like a dated version of outlook but i've set up one of my raid owl email accounts and i mean yeah here's here's my emails uh what i did notice it's kind of weird is that when i immediately set it up i got a microsoft outlook test message so um i don't know what that really means here but when you set up something in thunderbird it sends you a microsoft outlook test message but yeah here's uh here's emails a little bit to load um the looks pretty uh pretty normal floor lamp inquiry we want to we want you to review a floor lamp no so yeah i mean you're gonna have to go through if you're used to outlook and set up all your rules again can you even do that here uh yeah i'm not seeing there's themes dark dark mode oh yeah okay again this isn't a review of software this is basically like are they good enough to use so you've done your spreadsheets you've created some more documents you have your email checked and sent and ready to go now you need to hop on a zoom call with your boss co-workers lovers um so let's test out that i think i have to find a webcam okay update i uh i can't find my webcam so i'm ordering one right now on amazon a nice 22 dollar webcam that's the one i'm going with looks like a webcam wasn't gonna focus yep 22 dollars it says it'll arrive today there's no way if it does that would be very impressive i don't believe that i will update you guys tomorrow on getting zoom set up and doing kind of a video conference call on the raspberry pi but in the meantime i'm going to continue to do some office related things and i will give you guys either an update later today or tomorrow before we start day three which will probably be the gaming day so that'll be tomorrow uh in the meantime i will continue to mess around some office things and keep you guys updated alright so it's later in the day i downloaded vs code and i took a shot at doing some coding now my actual job does a lot of coding and net which is probably the worst thing to pick up for a raspberry pi so i tried installing the c sharp uh plug-in for vs code or extension and it's just not supported i tried some workarounds to get any type of debugging going on here it did not work i could develop on here and then uh debug it on another machine but at that point there's really no point to doing that here so but if you want to use python or something else then you're more than welcome to uh develop on a pie everybody knows that you can develop a python on a raspberry pi but yeah i didn't really expect everything to go smoothly so all right day three um it's actually about 5 00 p.m now i had a lot of work to do today actually i was in training but anyway recap of day two regular office tasks they worked fine i messed with some coding a bit and obviously couldn't get dot networking on it but python is going to be good to go other web-based uh programming that you want to do is probably going to be fine but yeah remember how i said we wanted to try zoom i got in my twenty dollar webcam here and first impressions are that it looks every bit of those twenty dollars i spent on it so we have zoom up and i'm in a conference call with my boss hello how does how does it sound how does it look pretty normal does it really sound decent because the microphone's coming that's pretty good but it's coming from my webcam okay so how does it look though if i move around i mean not not great a little bit laggy i mean this is certainly doable if i if i entered a conference call with this setup would i would you fire me i'll take that as a nail thanks all right i'm gonna hang up now and get back to work okay so there you have it um zoom works the the classic work from home setup can be done with a raspberry pi not that i figured it wouldn't but honestly it was super easy zoom works in a web browser webcam just plugs in and auto detects so day three i said it was going to be gaming so first thing we're going to do is fire up the witcher 3 just kidding but i did actually try to play some aaa titles using parsec but there's no dedicated parsec app for the raspberry pi 4 there is one for the raspberry pi 3 but not for the four and there is no indication that that's ever coming but parsec does have a web app i tried that it was not good at all not playable at all so we're doing away with parsec maybe some other streaming uh service works but uh parsec's my main one and that didn't seem to work but what the pi does do well is emulation so we're gonna download some emulators and some roms that we legally own and i will test those out so at the moment i'm following this tutorial to get retropie installed on my pie alongside raspberry pi os because i don't want to get rid of raspberry pi os i want it to kind of run alongside of each other so i'm using the guide directly off of retropie.org uk and so far so good um i guess we can just pick i don't know let's let's just do the basic install okay it got hot um let me take a minute while this is installing to say that yes i know a lot of these things people knew you could do a lot of these things that i'm doing people knew you couldn't do there's a lot of things out there that i'm not testing but this is seven straight days of using this i'm showing you my experience with it i'm trying to go through uh situations that i would use it on a daily basis uh situations that i wouldn't necessarily always use on a daily basis but want to fit in the video i know other people's workflow is completely different and you're probably thinking oh well he can't run this he didn't test this i can't possibly test every single thing and i apologize for that i know this video is already going to be super long and uh talking to future me who's editing this video on this thing let me know how it is right here uh between one out of ten yeah i know a lot of these things seem simple but the big tests are going to come with photo editing and video editing because i think those are two things that nobody really does on the raspberry pi and i'm interested to see how that's going to work out okay i got cold again um this has been awful i've tried multiple times to install retropie and i keep getting the same error seems to be common on the raspberry pi 4 cannot successfully build sdl 2 and some other stuff just doesn't work uh every time i tried to build it takes like an hour at least so installing that's not working i'm going with a different solution laca but it's late and i'm gonna try to get that installed and then this will flow over into the next day but this has been a huge failure all right day four and i am so not having a good time right now i tried to look up to see if locker could be installed in a desktop environment and it can't uh my only solution was with retropie and that doesn't work apparently with the bullseye version of raspberry pi os as of the date that i'm making this video so if you're watching this in the future and it is available cool it wasn't available for me gaming on the raspberry pi 4 in a desktop environment not great yes i know i could dual boot and run retropie on its own separate hard drive but that takes away from the point of this being a desktop test for the raspberry pi i'm using this in the desktop environment not dual booting two different os's so basically i'm stuck with browser games so yeah neopets it is so the next three days i guess i will be focusing on the video and photo editing aspect of this and i assume that this is going to be worse than everything else combined so fingers crossed if you're seeing this video on youtube that means i successfully did it but i am guaranteeing that it wasn't fun so last ditch effort at gaming i'm going with the x86 emulation using box x86 i believe it's called yeah so that is currently compiling right now i'm gonna run it and hopefully we can get some type of games working um i can't go down without having something work all right i'm i'm giving up i'm throwing in the towel i've tried using box 86 it doesn't work at all with bullseye trying wine i've tried installing steam i've tried following guides for the raspberry pi 4 specifically nothing works steam got close but i got an error something about steam ui.s.o unable to locate looked it up it's just some like generic error error error for installation and basically if you want a game on a raspberry pi either just use retropie or something um play on that on its own boot disk or use a raspberry pi 3 because it seems like everything is supported for the raspberry pi 3 or just don't use bullseye the new version of raspberry pi os so yeah this has been a huge huge failure okay i have a confession to make it's actually day seven the last day of the challenge now you're wondering where day five and six went well honestly i didn't do too much on day five and six i was so demoralized from not being able to basically play any games that i just kind of use the pie as normal web browsing youtube hanging out on discord normal stuff and i've also started the process of editing this video which you can see right here and shockingly it's not terrible um i'm gonna get into my actual thoughts with editing i'm using caden live and my initial kind of hypothesis was that there's absolutely zero chance i was going to be able to edit a video on a raspberry pi but it seems like i'm actually going to be able to do it so cool so here we are in caden live you can see i have quite a few clips loaded into the timeline this is pretty much days one two three and four and i've already started piecing together and doing my a cuts of the initial footage and it's doable obviously i've created proxies of my clips so when i'm importing the clips it's automatically creating proxies which are lower resolution versions of the original so that i can edit off of those and that is surprisingly doable and it doesn't take too long to create the proxies i accidentally filmed in 4k once and that took a while but at 1080p it's not bad so you can see i'm scrubbing and i mean yeah that's not too shabby and i click play it takes about five seconds but after that when you're looking at things for the raspberry i've lowered the resolution to 360p because obviously the lower the resolution the easier it is going to be to play if i bump it back up to 720p i think it might struggle a bit drop it down so this is at 720p and we're getting a lot of skipping okay so you can't handle that so my plan for the rest of today is to try to get the first four days uh cut and edited maybe throw in some special effects and see how that works boom once that is done i will get back to you guys with kind of a full review of editing on the raspberry pi and using caden live okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and import those last two clips that i found and we're going to see how long it takes to create those proxies so these are our 400 megabyte and 800 megabyte clips 1080p uh those are one minute and 10 second and 2 minute and 15 seconds so let's start a timer we're actually about what 10 seconds late two minutes and roughly 30 seconds for the two minute and 15 second clip that's also while it was doing a proxy at the same time as the 1 minute and 10 second clip so not bad for a 1080p clip yeah 1080p making proxies for caden live you're looking at about for a single maybe 20 to 30 over the actual time of the clip so if you're looking at a one minute clip it's probably going to take about a minute and 20 seconds a minute 15 seconds to make a proxy for it at 1080p not bad definitely makes it easy to work with so if you're going to edit at all you're going to have to make proxies so yep all right the video is relatively complete and this has been by far the most pleasant experience of this entire week and if you would have told me that were the case that editing on the raspberry pi was going to be the best experience i had this week i would have said you are lying but apparently that's the case that for making proxies of the videos and turning down the render resolution to 360p 360p it's actually very very usable obviously you're not going to get the same type of quality and ease of use of other programs like davinci or final cut or premiere pro but on a raspberry pi this by far exceeded expectations however my thumbnail has been awful to work with i'm using to create the i'm using to create the thumbnail and it following the theme of this entire week it just looks like an older version of like photoshop or something and it has some features that you know make it usable you can adjust saturation you know you can do your curves and whatnot but like masking on here is awful making adjustments and then undoing them or adjusting or making edits to your adjustments after you've done them is awful so this is what i came up with i'm not super happy with it but with what i'm working with it's passable but yeah that's it i mean i'll kind of walk through what i've done with the thumbnail i'm gonna do it really quick because i know this video is super long and it's not that entertaining from i just edited it and it's not one of my best videos but oh well all right here is what we started with i did some cropping and i took down the resolution of it a bit because working with a 48 megapixel uh photo is not the best on a raspberry pi so i took the resolution down i then added some saturation to it adjusted the color it was a little too red i brightened up the pie itself a little bit i smoothed out some of these bumps down here uh with the stamp tool the clone stamp tool uh what did i do here i made some blur to the background i added my text and you can't just add stroke apparently you have to do some roundabout ass backwards way of adding stroke so i did that with some drop shadow same thing with this and that's it not much to it but it was not a pleasant experience i cannot wait to get back to photoshop and that's it it has been a week of using the pie so that only leaves one thing left to do one second oh okay let's wrap this up now let me make one thing perfectly clear i am not an expert in linux i am not some super guru when it comes to anything linux or anything raspberry pi but i do consider myself you know above average when it comes to tech now i know i'm certainly not an idiot so if you're looking at a lot of this stuff and thinking well why didn't he do this or you know he could have done this yes i probably could have and yes i tried a lot of stuff behind the scenes that didn't make it into the video because there was a lot of footage for this seven day challenge but it's my experience this is what i went through i can only give you my personal experience yours may be completely different but i can't document your experience so overall um the raspberry pi works perfectly fine as a web browser sending emails maybe hop on a zoom call it's fine for that for gaming it sucks specifically the raspberry pi 4 on 64-bit raspberry pi os if you're gonna do gaming on it when you want a desktop environment go with the raspberry pi 3 there's a lot more stuff supported for that or just boot up retropie or something to do emulation don't even worry about a desktop operating system go straight for a emulation based operating system when it came down to content creation that was a thing i thought was going to be absolutely awful and the photo editing was kind of awful but i'll chalk that up to me not being experienced in i don't know if just sucks as a software compared to like photoshop but it honestly wasn't terrible in terms of an actual experience with the hardware video editing completely blew my mind i thought it was going to be a miserable experience i didn't even know if i was going to be able to edit on there i was prepared to load it up and do it in premiere pro my windows machine be like sorry guys i had to at least get the video out there but it by far exceeded my expectations when it came to video editing if you make proxies for your footage it's completely usable in caden live but if there's anything i covered in this video that you want more information about or um just want me to do another video about let me know down in the comments i don't know exactly how long this video took to render yet but i will put that down in the description below um it's probably a 30 minute video so my guess is an hour and 30 minutes we'll see that's it if you like this video if you like this type of challenge thing let me know if there's another week-long challenge i can do i have an ipad that might be interesting i have an nvidia jetson nano maybe do that we'll see but if you like content like this please give the video a like if you like tech in general then please subscribe to my channel thank you so much for watching and i will see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 2,963

Keywords:

Id: dN0rDevdeyo

Length: 34min 28sec (2068 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021