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Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspbery Pi 4?

11 points by tsjq ↗ HN
I use my Raspberry Pi3 for piHole. Curious what do you do with your Raspberry Pi 4 for ? whether it can be used in place of a regular Desktop , for checking mails, watching youtube, Netflix, Prime, working on some Google stuff like Docs, Mail, Spreadsheets, etc ? whether 8GB is needed ?

14 comments

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liamwestray
It works pretty well with Manjaro ARM for light desktop (what you’ve described) use with the 4gb version.

The biggest drawback is the sd-card speed. I’m waiting for an SBC with emmc to come out later this year to replace my pi4.

ksaj
I use mine as a regular desktop, and Lisp programming. It's the 4Gb version, and it does most of those things just fine. I haven't used Netflix or Prime, so I can't say anything about them. I can watch CBC Gem streams just fine, though, so I would expect it to be fine. It all boots up almost instantly, which is something that I love.

It's the first pi that I've had that runs Youtube without stuttering, and it is plugged into two 4K monitors. I'm sure it would go down if I tried to do too many things at once, and especially if I gave Chrome enough tabs to eat up all the performance. But I haven't really had that problem so far, like I did (constantly) with the Raspberry Pi 3. So I'm pretty happy with how it is working out for the standard usage things.

dchuk
What caused you to pick a Pi as your primary machine? Not doubting you, just interesting to see you have two 4K monitors yet just a pi for your computer
ksaj
I have other systems as well. My music production machine is loaded to the hilt Mac with stupid amounts of drive space and memory. I need it for recording music, and doing things to the occasional video. I believe in segregation of duty - it spends as little time connected to the network as necessary to stay updated, and that's about it. I also have an older iMac with a Wacom tablet, but again, segregation of duties.

I got into the Raspberry Pi 3 because I was experimenting with MPI and didn't want to buy a full size/weight cluster. It wound up being kinda fun for everything else when I wasn't multi-processing, too. And it cleanly did everything except Youtube (which I've already mentioned).

My music station is dual monitor (hence your question) and both monitors have two inputs... so of course when I bought a pi4 I plugged it into both immediately. The pi4 handles the load for my usual activity and my Lisp stuff, and I like the OS (Raspbian). Of course its slower than a typical desktop, but it's barely an issue - it's not particularly slow enough to matter for general things. It doesn't feel sluggish. Web pages take exactly the same amount of time and effort. The office suite runs perfectly fine. And Youtube doesn't stutter (although Chrome is the one thing that is clearly at its limits, according to the cpu meter...). So I just ended up doing most things there.

I should add that I also have some Arduino bits and bobble, some robot kits, and a boatload of electronic gear. So it's not just random that I use the Pi a lot. I just ended up enjoying it enough to spend a lot of time on it. Its actually better than my laptop that continually reminds me why I'm not a Microsoft Windows fan.

It's easy to back up, and if it broke down, meh, buy another. It keeps up, but won't hurt my bank if it blows up, either. I can run a lot of them silently. A lot of non-typical reasons, probably.

I'm not a gamer, so although 8Gb will be better (I'll get one eventually) the 4Gb actually suites me fine.

dchuk
(Both docker based) Plex/Medusa/radarr torrent media server, and pi hole for my local network. Works like a damn champ for both purposes, streams perfectly to the Apple TV’s in the house and works great for remote streaming too. Pi hole is amazing, set and really forget while upgrading your whole internet experience.

Next project might be a network time machine server, might use a second pi for that though

throwitawayfam
Do you do transcoding on your Pi?
dchuk
Because I’m always streaming to Apple TV’s, I’m pretty much always just direct streaming and not transcoding. It’s in my todo list to async transcode all downloads to an optimized format, but it’s basically a premature optimization for my use case right now so I haven’t gotten to it
p0d
Off-site backup to my garden shed i.e. shed retrieves house data over wifi.

The pi4 lives in a plastic box with an encrypted usb drive attached.

Just realise I didn't read question well ;-)

giantg2
I think you should be fine with 4GB. Only thing I would wonder about is if you're streaming 4K how the Pi4 would handle that. I think it would be ok, but I'm not sure.

I also run a Pi-Hole. I use a Pi Zero for that.

d--b
I thought running Netflix didnt work on pi because it needs some kind of DRM module that doesnt run on ARM. Is that incorrect?
detaro
The DRM module is available for ARM by now. Performance might be an issue, not sure if the Pi 4 is fast enough for 1080p now.
leipert
I have multiple raspberry pi’s running in the office. Two Zero Ws in Lamps, a raspberry pi 4 as a controller for our 3D printer (octoprint) and a raspberry pi 1 as a pihole.

At home I am using one raspberry pi 4 as a pihole, sorting Mails with imapfilter and controlling our smart home with node-red.

No desktop use, don’t even have the GUI installed.

lukaszkups
Retro Pie. Playing NES games with my 5yo kid :)