The Pi5 is quite reasonable, and the Pi 500 by extension, but I just have two things that I wish they’d fix:
I wish the NVMe port was populated. The Pi 5’s desktop performance feels massively better with a cheap NVMe drive compared to a microSD card.
It would also be much better if it worked with full functionality with an actually standard USB-PD power adapter instead of requiring a custom 5V 5A adapter. The whole point of USB-C and USB-PD is reusability. Instead, for the Pi5/500 I have to buy a dedicated USB power adapter rather than using the existing 45W/65W/100W ones I already own.
I believe there would be a market for themed keyboards designed after vintage computers with RPi module carrier boards. This is kind of the heir of the BBC micro and if love one with a black top, white bottom, and red function keys.
Clockwork Pi has one modeled after a TRS-80 Model 100, but it's a bit too small. A full sized Model 100-like would be super cool.
Can it play youtube videos without saturating the resources yet?
This was a major problem with Pi 4/400, I had to resort to quite an extreme overclock and some hacky custom browser builds to improve this. Bought it for a family member new to computing. I was put off so much of the 'pi as a basic desktop computer' that I wouldn't buy another for this usecase. Never did make sense to me why it struggled so much with a quad core SoC that should have been able to handle it.
First thing I do on an SBC now is to see what resources are consumed playing back a 1080p youtube video.
There's a bunch of different codecs in use with YouTube videos. Some of them are more intense than others to decode.
It'd be nice if it was a user preference on YouTube, wherein: A user could say "VP9? Lol, no -- there's no way that's gonna work. How about h.264? I know I can play that."
But it's really not that way even though it should be. Instead, we get a vaguely-meaningless way to coarsely change resolutions and codecs are selected by the man behind the curtain.
This problem is something that can be an issue even on x86 systems that otherwise performs very well for other every-day tasks.
>It'd be nice if it was a user preference on YouTube, wherein: A user could say "VP9? Lol, no -- there's no way that's gonna work. How about h.264? I know I can play that."
No need for a user preference. There's an api that allows the site to query how well a given codec would work.
The trouble, then, would be that YouTube's implementation is either broken or nonexistent. (We can tell this because if it did exist and did work well, then there would not be complaints.)
I've not seen 1080p playback issues even on 3rd gen Intel machines, to be honest. All I could think is that it was a driver issue with PiOS, as the SoC [0] should have good support for decoding these codecs. When I was in the rabbit hole trying to solve the issue I read many reports from others with the same problems.
The same question applies to most GNU/Linux distributions for laptops.
The last time I was able to use hardware video decoding for YouTube on my Asus 1215B netbook, was with Flash plugin for Firefox.
After the plugin was dropped, never again, regardless of how many incantations of VAAPI, AMD and Intel drivers.
That netbook died last year.
It is due to stuff like this that I have settled on Apple, Microsoft and Google offerings (ChromeOS and Android use only the Linux kernel, with managed userspace).
my main problem with the raspberry pi 4 8GB as a desktop PC is that first, the 8GB model is not exactly "cheap", and by the time you add all the extra stuff needed to make it usable (power supply, case, heatsink, fan, good sized of quality microsd card, etc) it costs well above a hundred bucks...
And for $100 I can go to ebay and get a used dell small form factor desktop with a core i5-something quad core cpu, 16GB RAM, 160GB Intel SSD which will run circles around it in performance as a real linux desktop.
The only thing the rpi has going for it is tiny size and its I/O pins which aren't so relevant if your application is "i want a desktop that can capably play youtube videos"
The Pi5 is quite reasonable, and the Pi 500 by extension, but I just have two things that I wish they’d fix:
I wish the NVMe port was populated. The Pi 5’s desktop performance feels massively better with a cheap NVMe drive compared to a microSD card.
It would also be much better if it worked with full functionality with an actually standard USB-PD power adapter instead of requiring a custom 5V 5A adapter. The whole point of USB-C and USB-PD is reusability. Instead, for the Pi5/500 I have to buy a dedicated USB power adapter rather than using the existing 45W/65W/100W ones I already own.
Related:
Raspberry Pi 500 Review: The keyboard is the computer, again
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364038
Maybe some day the Pi team will figure out how to use the full size HDMI port footprint on their designs. Maybe some day.
I'm assuming they chose Micro-HDMI here so they could use the same part they use on the Pi 5.
Warm memories of the Amiga 500 came up. :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500
I believe there would be a market for themed keyboards designed after vintage computers with RPi module carrier boards. This is kind of the heir of the BBC micro and if love one with a black top, white bottom, and red function keys.
Clockwork Pi has one modeled after a TRS-80 Model 100, but it's a bit too small. A full sized Model 100-like would be super cool.
Would be nice if it was just a carrier for the compute modules, so as new ones are releases it could be upgraded
Can it play youtube videos without saturating the resources yet?
This was a major problem with Pi 4/400, I had to resort to quite an extreme overclock and some hacky custom browser builds to improve this. Bought it for a family member new to computing. I was put off so much of the 'pi as a basic desktop computer' that I wouldn't buy another for this usecase. Never did make sense to me why it struggled so much with a quad core SoC that should have been able to handle it.
First thing I do on an SBC now is to see what resources are consumed playing back a 1080p youtube video.
That depends on the video, too.
There's a bunch of different codecs in use with YouTube videos. Some of them are more intense than others to decode.
It'd be nice if it was a user preference on YouTube, wherein: A user could say "VP9? Lol, no -- there's no way that's gonna work. How about h.264? I know I can play that."
But it's really not that way even though it should be. Instead, we get a vaguely-meaningless way to coarsely change resolutions and codecs are selected by the man behind the curtain.
This problem is something that can be an issue even on x86 systems that otherwise performs very well for other every-day tasks.
>It'd be nice if it was a user preference on YouTube, wherein: A user could say "VP9? Lol, no -- there's no way that's gonna work. How about h.264? I know I can play that."
No need for a user preference. There's an api that allows the site to query how well a given codec would work.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaCapabi...
Perhaps there is.
The trouble, then, would be that YouTube's implementation is either broken or nonexistent. (We can tell this because if it did exist and did work well, then there would not be complaints.)
Are we sure the browser is reporting it correctly?
I've not seen 1080p playback issues even on 3rd gen Intel machines, to be honest. All I could think is that it was a driver issue with PiOS, as the SoC [0] should have good support for decoding these codecs. When I was in the rabbit hole trying to solve the issue I read many reports from others with the same problems.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-raspberry_pi_4_b_broadcom_...
Extension can do that!
Enhanced h264ify or something let's you choose exactly the codec you want
Can confirm—I use enhanced-h264ify on my x230 and it works a charm for watching YouTube without nuking the performance of everything else
The same question applies to most GNU/Linux distributions for laptops.
The last time I was able to use hardware video decoding for YouTube on my Asus 1215B netbook, was with Flash plugin for Firefox.
After the plugin was dropped, never again, regardless of how many incantations of VAAPI, AMD and Intel drivers.
That netbook died last year.
It is due to stuff like this that I have settled on Apple, Microsoft and Google offerings (ChromeOS and Android use only the Linux kernel, with managed userspace).
my main problem with the raspberry pi 4 8GB as a desktop PC is that first, the 8GB model is not exactly "cheap", and by the time you add all the extra stuff needed to make it usable (power supply, case, heatsink, fan, good sized of quality microsd card, etc) it costs well above a hundred bucks...
And for $100 I can go to ebay and get a used dell small form factor desktop with a core i5-something quad core cpu, 16GB RAM, 160GB Intel SSD which will run circles around it in performance as a real linux desktop.
The only thing the rpi has going for it is tiny size and its I/O pins which aren't so relevant if your application is "i want a desktop that can capably play youtube videos"
Yes there's some really good used PC deals on eBay. I really like some of the $350ish options.
Do this and the RPi5 run (proper mainline) Linux yet, or are they still only usable on the fork hacked together in-house?
I believe 6.12 has some Pi5 support.
I wish this had a TouchPad integrated to it, and an option for a battery. It would be an excellent laptop replacement with my Xreal Air.
At that point it would be an altogether different product.