I made a couple of videos showing you how
to use a Raspberry Pi 2 as a media player
or a great retro gaming machine for your big
screen TV.
But I didn't talk about using it as an actual
desktop computer.
There are stories of it being used as just
that in the third world countries, after all
that's what it was actually designed for.
But what is that experience like? Is it a
practical proposition?
I have the latest Raspberry Pi 3 right here
so.. let's give it a try!
The Pi 3 is largely the same as the Pi 2 to look at, the dimensions are the same,
the ports are in the same position and that's great as it'll fit in any of the Pi 2 cases that are out there.
Obviously we don't have a lot of horsepower
here, even compared to the most basic of desktop
of laptop computers, but the spec list is
actually very generous for a $35 device...
OK so let's boot it up...
It's pretty quick, despite the fact it's running off an SD card...
I'm timing this on my watch as it goes... So that's about 15 seconds, that's pretty good!
So let's start off with some apps...
We'll take a look at the office suite, they
pre-install Libre Office so let's go with
the word processor, Libre Office Writer.
First startup is a little bit slower I guess...
OK, so let's quit it and load it up again,
just to see, because Linux does cache everything in memory.
It should be quicker this time around...
Yeah much quicker once we take the bottleneck of the SD card out of the loop!
So... maximize it and let's just see if we can fill the whole screen here because it looks a bit weird...
I don't actually use Libre Office so bear with me...
Page width!
OK so let's just type away.
I can't spell...
OK, let's see if we can add a table, just a
bit of interest to the document, nothing too big...
four by four should do.
OK, so this could be like a science report
that someone's writing, or some sales report
or anything else for that matter so I'll just
fill in a few headings here...
I mean certainly in terms of going through
the menus, choosing these options, adding
that table, it seems as fast as any other
office machine that I can imagine.
No complaints there.
OK, I'll just fill something else in, just for the sake of completeness.
OK, so let's try exporting this as a PDF...
Just a test... actually let's put it on the
desktop so that I remember where I left it!
OK, so yeah, word processor, I mean, it is
what it is, seems fine...
So let's see what else there is in the office suite...
Spreadsheet work is normally a big deal for
offices so lets go with Libre Office Calc.
That loads quite a bit quicker!
So I think what I'll do is I'll create a small
table here with just a few values in it, and
then we'll see if we can create a chart out
of it while we're at it. Fairly common office
or school report sort of work...
So I'll just put a few names in, put some
numbers to it and we'll just do like a bar
chart or a line graph or something...
I certainly am pretty impressed so far I mean, I know we're not doing anything taxing but...
it's actually, considering it's a mobile phone processor in essence, it's surprisingly good...
So let me just select these values here... And where do we add a chart? There's the chart...
Wow, ok, that was quick! Line chart? No let's go with a column chart, probably more appropriate!
It's a little slow updating the preview window...
I'll give it a title,  I dunno, "test chart", who cares!
Let's see if we can sort of move it around,
yep that's fine, it's following the mouse.
If I try and resize it on the fly...
Yeah... that lags a bit!
But I mean it's fine, it lags a bit, but it's fine.
So I could print it.. give us a print preview?
Yes it does...
Calculated that perfectly quickly...
I mean the CPU, if you look in the top corner, the CPU it's idling basically.
OK let's try Minecraft, I've never actually
played this game but they've pre-installed
it I guess it's pretty popular with kids and
it's sort of creative, Lego style I guess...
So looking at the CPU again, top right, it's
sitting at 25% and that tells me it's using
one of the four cores, so this is not a multi
threaded game unfortunately.
OK, so this is Minecraft...
I'm just doing this really to test out the
3D performance of the graphics, so WASD keys...
use the trackpad, I'm using a trackpad by
the way on a cheap keyboard here.
Yeah, framerate seems fine, wandering around,
I mean, lets face it it's not exactly Crysis
in terms of graphics but seems perfectly fine.
Lets see if I can maximize the screen I guess,
I have no idea how to play this game...
Let me try maximizing it, can we get it sort of full screen? See if it's gonna...
I guess just the window behind that's sightly offset..
Give that a go...
OK, we're full screen pretty much.
So... yeah, framerate seems smooth, jumping
up and down no problems there. I guess that's
Minecraft so...
Looks fine to me, I'm sure Minecraft aficionados
will have more to say but,
performance for 3D stuff looks perfectly acceptable. As long as you don't want Call of Duty or something ...
OK so let's take a look at the web browser, that's kind of important
and web browsing is surprisingly resource intensive these days...
So let's go to the BBC news website, that's
a pretty busy web page and it's not exactly optimized...
OK, loads up... images are a bit slow loading in...
I'm on a 300 Meg connection here by the way, so,
OK the Pi's only got a 100 megabit of Ethernet but my internet connection is not the the bottleneck.
So, it's taken a while to draw it but it's drawn the page.
Let's click on the article...
Still loading...
And we're done.
Need flash player for the video, come on BBC!
It should be HTML5 these days!
So scrolling up and and down it's a little
bit sluggish I have to say. Definitely sluggish.
If you scroll faster it just has to redraw
the screen completely it definitely cant keep up.
So the browser, hmmm.... not great.
I know the BBC's website is not the best one to begin
with but... it's not great.
Let's try YouTube, obviously that's important
to both you and me!
So let's give Youtube a go...
I'm not expecting much here to be honest...
The Pi 2 was dreadful, the framerate was practically unusable.
so it's loading the page in, better than the
BBC actually and there's more graphics on here...
So let's watch a video, I mean any video pretty much will do...
HD apparently?! That's probably optimistic!
Yeah... that's struggling, I don't know if
that's buffering actually... so let's try
360p probably might be a... give it a better
chance.
Yeah that's better...
The color banding is terrible !
But the framerate is fine, I mean it's perfectly
watchable, the color banding's horrific but...
So let me try again on 720... maybe it'll
do 720?
Yeah, that... the framerate looks perfectly
fine, and of course 720 means if someone's
showing some text or some sort of screencast
how-to video, you'd want to see the detail
and I think that would be fine, full screen?
I think it might have slowed down a little bit? I'm not sure...
the compression artifacts
look terrible though...
Yeah it's definitely a little more sluggish in terms of framerate,
but it's watchable... Its not great but...
for the purposes the Pi was designed for,
basically education and watching some educational
videos so that you learn something, as opposed to this rubbish...
yeah, that's perfectly fine. I mean I can live with that. Definitely.
We browsing and YouTube were the least impressive aspects of the Pi as a desktop machine,
but they are usable at a push. I think I'd be very pleased with this machine if I was in the third world,
or even as a kid here in the west if my parents couldn't afford a more typical computer.
I could learn to code on this just like I did on my Atari ST in the early 90's,
as well as play some interesting games.
In fact, this machine is far more powerful
and far snappier than what I had back then!
And it's only $35!
If you're looking to learn Linux,
especially the command line tools, as well as coding for the command line, be it in Python, C, Ruby, whatever
this machine is more than enough.
And the GUI's there to let you code in one window,
run your command line in another,
and follow tutorials on the web as you go.
So is it a usable desktop machine?
Well, with the latest Pi 3 I can finally say... yes!
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