People who say that the raspeberry PI is "bad" and "barely useable" say so because Ubuntu + Chrome + botnet social networking sites tend to slow your PI to a crawl.
If you configure i3, compton, and build your own distro from scratch WITHOUT ubuntu, then the rpi can actually be very fast and snappy for programming.
If this laptop is anything like the raspberry pi, then it will require LOTS of customization to get the OS to work right. But once it's configured just right and you stay away from botnet browsers and sites like FB and IG, then the pi is actually quite nice.
Yup, just _not_ using a massive DE goes most of the way for improving performance, especially on little devices like this. i3wm is great for this because it's a tiling window manager for both the masses and for the expert.
Also once you are using i3 then using Debian instead of Ubuntu makes little difference to the user while going a fair way to removing a lot of bloat.
However suggesting linux from scratch is a bit extreme, it can be fun but you can get 99% of the benefits with i3 alone and maybe choosing a distro with a lighter HD footprint. Building your own OS is a lot of work for most people on the otherhand, and will scare people off your otherwise sound suggestion :P
Personally, I don't think laptops like the Pinebook should ever be used by the masses because, like you said, building your own OS from scratch is difficult, even for the tech savvy! And no I'm not talking about compiling your own Gentoo yourself. What I mean is just starting with a barebones distro with NOTHING installed, then sudo apt-get intsall your carefully selected list of packages- followed by tons and tons of googling and man pages to figure out how to configure your config files in just the right way.
This is how I learned linux- the hard way. My powerful windows 10 workstation died one day, and I decided to actually try using my abandoned rpI for day to day use. It took a LOT of googling, but I finally figured out how to make my pi enjoyable after close to half a year's worth of effort.
I'm definitely buying this laptop when I get paid because I am one of the few people out there who's masochistic enough to enjoy pi-like devices. This laptop is EXACTLY what I have been looking for.
Maybe you mean nothing more than what comes with the distro's install? In that case a clean Ubuntu counts? I think you should rethink what you have in mind; maybe you mean a distribution with few default packages and minimal preconfigured settings? Something like Arch?
You're right, I probably used the wrong words there. By barebones distro, I actually meant "headless debian with minimal packages configured to fit nicely inside 1/3rd of a 32 Gb SD card". My main problem with Ubuntu is that even Xubuntu felt too bloated for me under raspberry pi. I can't even fit Xubuntu into a 64Gb SD card without running out of space. What do all those extra gigs do? They sure as hell don't make my rpI faster that's for sure.
yeah, once you move away from any kind of "it comes preinstalled with a DE" type distro, moving to a headless barebones distro is easy, and you can mostly take your configs with you... xorg is also so frickin easy these days. I've yet to try something even more minimal like arch or.. from scratch! but maybe one day with enough time :)
I think The trick to helping others though is to show it can be done in stages, because trying to learn everything at once is too hard, it's easy to forget how long it took to acquire all of the knowledge and skill that make it seem easy to set up a bare bones linux distro into something comfortable and yet lightweight.
For most people I'd advise: Ubuntu (cos the web will help), then find your lightweight desktop of choice by installing and experimenting along side... then try to replicate it on barebones (or ubuntu server, mostly just involves adding xorg to your install list)... then experiment with more lightweight distros... and if tinkering with your desktop is not satisfying enough then you will no doubt go down the from scratch route as well eventually but at that point you don't need people telling you what to do. The thing that's lost with my seemingly simple suggestion is that you will learn so much by yourself while trying to achieve this, but without sacrificing your productivity.
Do you reckon a recent RPi is good enough for Emacsing away, with the occasional PDF-reading and watching videos w/ mpv? I think having a desktop computer with a wider monitor would be a nice improvement for me, given using a laptop for long times is not really ergonomical. If I can have a decent enough desktop experience with such a setup, that'd be very nice.
PDF? PDFs and the web will be laggy unless you set up a compositor like Compton to speed things up. There's enough GPU power in the PI to set up decent 2d compositing with transparencies.
Videos? I wouldn't count on it because youtube videos are still choppy for me. Even after a ton of work, I still get light choppiness on 320p video. I haven't tried local video files yet, though I assume local files might perform better than web videos. I mean, gifs and webms play smoothly without choppiness, so why not mpv video?
One of the biggest flaws in the raspberry pi is the USB Micro port. If your USB micro cable is broken and unreliable, then your PI will get extremely slow and may even crash a lot due to the flickering power supply. Your pi won't tell you what's wrong either, which makes troubleshooting a pain until you figure out that the lightning bolt icon on your screen means power problem.
If you like linux and tinkering, I would highly recommend you get a pi. Just don't expect a pi to work out of the box. Most distros are so bloated and the pi is so limited, that you have to trim everything down for the pi to be even remotely enjoyable.
If you wish to send me a download link to an example video file of yours, I can play it on my setup for you and let you know how well the video performs.
Thanks a lot! I'm quite comfortable with Gnu/Linux and FreeBSD, and I do have a Pi, though it sits there on the shelf running a couple cron jobs and being a CUPS server. I've never tried it for desktop computing tho (I don't think I've ever used it unless through ssh). I'll definitely test it out when I have a monitor handy (I'll either use a Pi or connect the monitor to my laptop, I really need a screen at my eye level, I'm fed up with the neck aches because I was too caught up with reading a paper, or more often, fiddling with my emacs config).
WRT PDFs and web, I use qutebrowser w/o JS, which is lightweight, and most PDFs are just papers with nothing fancy (I'm a humanities student / prospective researcher). I can take the choppyness if it's not unusable.
The videos are just any video on Youtube. Mpv is a program similar to mplayer, and I use it to watch any video on the disk or use it like "mpv <youtube url>" to view videos from youtube (it even has titles and can show progress, really nice), I guess you mistook it for a video format.
Thanks. I'd probably put FreeBSD on it though. I can't use it because I can't get suspend and resume working on laptops, but I miss it like Odysseus misses Ithaka. One of the few software I actually love, it is...
I recently switched to Gnome 3 (5th of march, tells me mercurial), and it just crawled my laptop, w/ 4G mem and i3 cpu @ 1.80 GHz. That's not super fast, but it freezing with merely Firefox and Emacs running was unacceptable. I tended to blame that on Firefox, but when I switched to Qutebrowser I understood that it was not it, and decided to see what was the cause. I saw that my fairly minimal Gnome 3 DE (i.e. the session and nm-applet, no extensions) took half of the resources. Six days ago I switched to Xmonad, boom, the machine hasn't used the swap since. Even when I start Chromium for some silly websites life makes me use. Even when I have Chromium, mpv, Qutebrowser and Emacs all open at once. With Gnome I'd probably have to kill Emacs in such a session a couple times...
Gnome 3 is really really bad. It is so bad that it actually makes me want to use Windows 10 instead.
Context: i've been using Xfce4 for the last 4-5 years and recently had to use Gnome3.x because of RHEL. Since I've a recent Gnome, I decided to also try a recent KDE.
Well...
- XFCE manages to be consistently fast and overall a joy to use
- KDE is getting usable again after the KDE4.0 mess. Still too much gummy by default, but it's so customizable that you can turn off most of the trash that is enabled by default.
- Gnome really looks like it has been designed for and tested against mentally challenged people. It's infuriating, most of its utilities lack menus and basic options/settings, to the point where having a GUI is more of an impediment rathen than being something useful.
I am very worried by the fact that Ubuntu is reverting back to Gnome.
If you configure i3, compton, and build your own distro from scratch WITHOUT ubuntu, then the rpi can actually be very fast and snappy for programming.
If this laptop is anything like the raspberry pi, then it will require LOTS of customization to get the OS to work right. But once it's configured just right and you stay away from botnet browsers and sites like FB and IG, then the pi is actually quite nice.