Using the Raspberry Pi 4 as an Everyday Desktop

hello and welcome everyone my name is steven foster and today we're talking about the raspberry pi 4 and specifically using it as a desktop computer now in my previous video i talked about how the raspberry pi versus the mac mini the raspberry pi made sense for me to replace the mac mini as a file server and i said how on paper it looked like the raspberry pi 4 might be the better everyday desktop pc at least at least for the price so i got plenty of comments from you guys here on youtube also across other social medias so i wanted to share with you guys what it was like using the raspberry pi as my main desktop for the day so i put ubuntu 20.10 on the raspberry pi and uh yeah i want to share with you guys some of my notes so first off installing the os on the sd card was was easier than it's ever been i previously had a raspberry pi 2 before this a 2 type b i think it was and getting an os up and running on the raspberry pi before was kind of always a challenge uh now with the raspberry pi imaging tool i just kind of connected a micro sd card to my mac ran that tool against the 2010 image and plugged it in and i was already at the installer ready to go super quick super fast and easy i didn't have to run any terminal commands or reformat the card or any crazy stuff like that it was very very easy to get up and running i should know i did start this off while i had a wired keyboard i didn't have a wired mouse i was trying to use my wireless mx master 2s that worked for a little bit and then that's actually partly what delayed this video getting out was uh all of a sudden it stopped working i couldn't figure out how to get it to work again and i ended up having to just order a wired keyboard and mouse from the raspberry pi foundation and uh that all worked fine so something to note right off the bat is if you use wireless devices you may have to do some extra troubleshooting and configuration to make sure they work and then another point before i dive in the flurk case that i talked about that's on this raspberry pi it was really hard to get the micro sd card in and out of there something to note that once you get that in there it's going to be difficult to remove i actually had to use like a butter knife to help get it out of there but just my experience so the first thing i did was i had to go watch something on youtube to see how well this performed now firefox on the pi defaulted to 720p playback and that had no issues i was able to bump it up to 1080p playback and was fine as long as i wasn't doing anything else in the background otherwise i would start dropping frames this is a 1440p display behind me um at 1440p or 4k i would have to sit there and allow allow the video to buffer enough just to get playback that was reliable and consistent and even then usually within a minute or so i would see frame start dropping again so if you want to watch 4k youtube on the raspberry pi plan on not doing anything else and maybe even active cooling the pie because the flirt case does passively cool the pie through a heatsink that's built into the case that's all metal but even that isn't really gonna save you you know as far as performance goes with dropping those frames now in my normal youtube usage and playback i usually have youtube off in a corner or i'm in picture-in-picture so 720p with that is totally fine but yeah if you want to use this as like something like an htpc with youtube on like a 4k tv or even a 1080p tv i don't know if it's going to do that for you which is kind of a bummer because on paper it looks like the raspberry pi might be able to do that but in real world usage i don't know if that's something that i would lean on it for but yeah i am curious for those of you with a raspberry pi for the 8 gigabyte model specifically if you are actively cooling it with a fan or other type of cooling mechanism and you are able to get better playback or other or better performance in general please let me know i would be curious to see your notes and thoughts for me i didn't want to get into the whole like benchmarking this thing because ultimately this is not how i'm going to use the raspberry pi but yeah this is just kind of satisfying curiosity um the next app that i really wanted to try was lightroom i thought about this especially as more and more creators are going mobile with phones thinking about the raspberry pi as a desktop where you could maybe review images on a larger screen maybe make some edits and tweaks but still have your primary creation tool being your phone and doing some edits and most of your edits on your phone could the raspberry pi have a place in that setup and i was actually really surprised i was it was very easy to just log into my adobe account load up my lightroom catalog from lightroom creative cloud and i was able to open up photos and start editing them now it was a lot slower than editing something like on my nzxt creator pc a lot slower i mean talking five seconds sometimes for a slider command to kick in or to even open up some of the raw images that i would be editing but it was usable and doable and that's i think that is a big win for the pie is that hey if you can access some of these things in the browser what's the next iteration of the raspberry pi going to be able to do is it going to be able to execute these things faster is it possible that adobe with lightroom in the browser could offload more of that stuff to their back end so it's not all trying to happen in the front end in the app i don't know but where it stands today and thinking back to that raspberry pi 2 that i had this is a huge leap forward especially again at this price point so i was very impressed with that that i i could open up my lightroom catalog i could see what was in there i could take a quick look at something even fire it off or share something uh with someone if i needed to and i think that's uh that's a pretty big win on the other hand spotify uh spotify was a nightmare i first tried playback in the web browser which the web app wouldn't play back because of drm support and then i think the help text that was there on spotify's website was for firefox on linux but not arm linux so that was a little bit confusing i don't know of any way to get the spotify web player working on the raspberry pi if you do drop it in the comments below it might help someone out but in the short time i was spending with it i wasn't able to get it up and running and then i did try to download the spotify app while spotify doesn't formally support the spotify app on linux they do have a snap package but again that can't be installed on the raspberry pi unfortunately so that's kind of a bummer i really especially with spotify being on a lot of phones and other mobile platforms not being able to get it on the raspberry pi especially having that that headphone jack would be really nice but yeah i'd really like to see spotify step up their game here and and make something on the raspberry pi or just arm in general i think that'd be i think that'd be pretty cool discord was another app that i i absolutely have to have i love the servers that i'm able to be a part of on discord which is great i don't have my own yet but if that's something that you would be interested in leave me a comment down below i i think one day i would really like to have my own discord channel so we'll see until then i was able to very easily log in on the web app get access to my discord servers there again the app i could not get to work i think probably because they don't have an arm binary and the only binaries that were out there were x86 or um some form of like amd intel chip support so kind of a bummer but but hey at least it worked in the web app um the other apps that i primarily use like hey for my email and notion for like my notes for writing scripts for these videos and things like that all those worked in the browser on firefox i at this point i wasn't even going to try to download their desktop apps because it looks like they just don't have arm binaries for linux they're only the amd and intel binaries or the x86 binaries so but i don't want this to turn into like a whole review about ubuntu and and arm operating systems and things like that like for me i was really trying to figure out what's the simplest path to getting an operating system on the pi seeing how well it performs and this is just the way that i i chose chose to play and that's fine so wrapping all this up i bought this raspberry pi 4 to replace a mac mini that was acting as a file server and an httpc a little bit i don't really need the raspberry pi 4 to be an ht pc because my tv is a smart tv and it has a lot of the apps or pretty much all the apps that i would need to watch youtube netflix disney plus any of that stuff on my tv so thankfully i don't need to rely on the raspberry pi for that because i was kind of bummed how pi4 did fall short of being able to watch like 4k youtube or even have spotify on it and play back spotify music on there but that's fine but i'm glad i tried the raspberry pi 4 as an everyday computer because watching how well lightroom did in the browser even though it is slow just to see that it is possible and fairly easy to get up and running leads me to believe that hey if if you if if you had a choice between no computer and the raspberry pi 4 you could actually get a lot out of this sort of hundred dollar computer setup and i think that's important i think that's what the raspberry pi foundation has been working towards is giving more and more people opportunities to get access to computers like when i was growing up i remember wanting a computer so bad my parents had one out in the living room but i wanted my own to kind of tinker with and if i could have had something like the raspberry pi for earlier in my life i think about where i eventually went with my career as a computer scientist and a software and systems engineer if i had that even earlier in my life i just wonder you know how much faster could i have progressed in my skills and my understanding of how computers work now obviously you're not going to be gaming on this computer you're not going to be doing video editing or rendering on this computer but but depending on what you need to do the raspberry pi 4 could be a desktop setup for you absolutely so i got to reconfigure this from ubuntu desktop to ubuntu server so it can be the file server that i actually need it to be the reason why i got it and that will be a future video so i hope to see you guys on that one again thank you so much for watching my name is stephen foster subscribe to this channel if you aren't already and i'm honored by everyone here who already has thank you so much for just being a part of this journey please be kind both in life and in the comments below and like this video if hopefully you got something out of it if this was useful or helpful to you and we will do it again soon you

Channel: Steven Foster

Views: 36,232

Keywords: Steven Foster, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 4, YouTube, Spotify, Lightroom, Adobe Lightroom, Notion, Desktop Setup, Creative Cloud, Photoshop, Discord, App Setup, How To, Test, Adafruit, Canakit, Pi 4, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 20.10, Snap Install, Groovy Gorilla, FireFox, Web Apps, What works

Id: xGmqOlL4KtU

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021