Hi,

I don't have any experience with the Raspberry Pi, but I'm thinking about the possibilities it has to offer. Some of my clients are on a tight bugdet, they're often using legacy hardware.

I wonder if an ARM version of an Xfce-based MLED would run satisfyingly on this sort of low-cost hardware. Does anyone here run software like Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and the likes on a Raspberry Pi? What's your experience with this hardware?

Cheers,

Niki

I don't know how much patience your clients have, but in my opinion and experience firefox runs way to slow on a raspberry pi for commmon use. I would expect the same for Libreoffice. Midori and Abiword might be more suitable, but you would have to compile them for the pi - which is a very timeconsuming job. The Pi is not really suitable as a ordinary desktop in a working environment.

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Last year I installed Slackware 14.0 on a Pi (model B). I run X with xdm, Xfce and no KDE stuff at all. The performance is fairly good, though it's a bit slow on the graphical side. Overall, don't expect Firefox et al. to be snappy. I still didn't try it with more lightweight applications like Midori and Abiword, but I guess they should make quite a difference.

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Don't bother with the Pi as a general purpose desktop. Its performance is *awful* and there is no realistic hope for improvement. People will be better off with legacy hardware. A Pentium III will perform better -- the processor will be comparable, but the PIII's disk, network and USB will perform better, and you can add more memory to the PIII, and if the PIII's graphics is bad you can change it. The only way the PIII will perform worse is power consumption.

In more detail, these are just some of the reasons why I lost interest in running Slackware ARM on the Pi:

The Pi's xorg is unaccelerated. There is no roadmap for solving this. The Pi Foundation are putting effort into Wayland, which guarantees that the Pi will be obsolete before there is a usable general purpose desktop. This, and the low available memory, mean that the small-footprint desktops (LXDE, XFCE) and browsers (Midori) are crippled. There is now a Pi-specific Epiphany fork; I don't know why a fork was necessary, but let's just observe that the last thing the world of Pi needs is more stuff that works *only* on the Pi and more stuff that *doesn't* work on the Pi.

The Pi's disk storage is rubbish, and there are no choices to make it better. The SD card is slow and unreliable, particularly since (a) the boot partition *must* use vfat, and (b) SD cards are made by evil bastards. You can use an attached USB disk for everything except the bootloader, but on the Model B (and A) the USB performance is *awful* -- less than 1 MB/sec on the B -- partly because the USB chip is rubbish, and partly because the manufacturer's open source driver is not fit for purpose. Improving the driver would require full documentation that the manufacturer can't/won't release. This *might* be better on the B+, but the Pi people, in their wisdom, went with a newer chip from the same manufacturer...

The Pi's network performance is rubbish. The network interface is attached to the USB bus, so its performance is just the same as a USB disk, less than 1 MB/sec, and it contends with everything else on the USB.

Kernel development is a mess. More than two years on, there is still no real progress on unifying the Pi-specific kernel with the mainstream kernel nor any real roadmap for getting there. They can't even drive git properly... I got sick of 'forced updates' and a forest of branches that weren't being updated.

I could go on, but what would be the point? The Pi is mostly fine for its purposes, which are teaching and embedded, and Slackware ARM is the best distribution *by* *far* that you can run on it. But I'd rather use a PIII for a general purpose desktop.

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Thanks very much for your detailed answers!

@55020 What are your views on something like the Beagleboard XM? Using the same software suite as originally mentioned above.

Hi Dman58, the Pi is the only such hardware I've tried, but I do remember looking at reviews of the Beagleboard XM and wishing I had more money and more time and more ideas for what to do with it

Thanks 55020, that was a funny and succinct review of the Pi as a desktop -- I shall link to it if I am asked about it.
I love my Pi but as a desktop computer it is appalling.

To be frank, it sums up ARM on the desktop in general. Unless the Linux distribution running on the device has been finely tuned specifically for the target device, it's going to suck.

My original idea was to be able to use Slackware on ARM as my desktop, but I've given up that idea. I would never switch from x86.

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First of all, thank you for Slackware ARM.

I wouldn't switch either, as I consider the Pi an interesting complement to my PC, not a possible replacement. In fact I do sometimes use it as a desktop machine, which allows me to have some actual work done that doesn't require a full-blown computer. As far as I'm concerned it is perfectly usable, for selected tasks, as long as one doesn't require graphic acceleration and outstanding performance. Moreover, when compared to the previously mentioned Pentium III the Pi is at least perfectly silent, it takes about 0.5% of the volume, and consumes about 5% of the power.

That said, considering that its price is $35 I wouldn't complain too much, even if hardware support is still not perfect. Of course it is not a device for the mainstream MS or Apple user, who would complain all the time about missing bells & whistles and not-so-snappy behavior.

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Thanks Philip for a good, balanced, positive comment -- you make me regret a lot of my negativity

Thank you, and don't worry , as sometimes I happen to be quite negative as well. And the Pi does have those objective limitations, and I admit that they can be frustrating: that's why I had to insert the "selected tasks" parentheses above (I wish I had not to, but reality wasn't agreeing with me).

Yes, wanting a better performance and/or some bells and whistles is for Windows/Apple users only. Jesus, can't you guys praise what you use without mention "the enemy". This type of post make me feel ashamed.

I didn't say that. I said that mainstream MS and Apple users wouldn't appreciate, for obvious reasons, running Slackware ARM on the Raspberry Pi. That is a fact, I guess. Besides, I don't have "enemies", and I don't want to fuel an off-topic flame war either. I'm really sorry if you are feeling ashamed, but I really can't help you.

Best wishes,
Philip

"i-microsofticized" user" is nothing more than pure stereotyping