08-13-2025
Why would somebody use a raspberry pi as a main computer that they depend on every day? Who cares?
Well, I can only answer one of those questions.
The really big highlight is the RAM (1GB, ouch (╥_╥) )
Pretty much everything about it is a completely normal, sane computer. I have the 1GB model because it was $20 cheaper, but I think now it’s around the same price. I do not recommend the 1gb RAM model since it can barely run a web browser.
I think the price is the most attractive part. It is around $60 and is easily replacable. With an external monitor and peripherals it’s very portable. Being able to fill your bag all the way while keeping your computer is wonderful✨. Compared to ~$200 laptops it does its job perfectly fine while being completely expendable.
However, there is some tricks (Just good configuration) to actually make it usable. The default raspberry pi environment is ok but could be a lot lighter on RAM.
I am using raspberry pi lite as the OS because I did not try anything else. Anything very bare bones that doesn’t come with a desktop should work. Also, use nmtui to configure your network settings.
This is where things get interesting. There are a few different
window managers, but these are the ones I tried. To install any of these
just add exec
This has really nice keybindings but suprisingly eats a lot of RAM, ~300MB idle. That is basically nothing if you have more then 1GB RAM though. Also drun took around 2-3 seconds to boot up for some reason not sure why (oh yeah, my computer sucks). Since it consumed RAM, I used something else.
This is an ancient (1987), barebones window manager. The GUI is… historically accurate. The bonus is that it uses around 1 to 2 MB of RAM and is extremely stable. However the GUI is kind of alien to anyone not used to it. Wikipedia has great documentation on this manager. Highly recommend if you want something that works.
Very good, stable, Windows-like UI. This one is very nice and conventional. The main bonus are the themes, however the program list sucks. I am not sure where this list is sourced from honestly but it is very disorganized. Keep in mind that TWM has the same issue.
For some reason the window resizing is stuck to the bottom of the window. I was not able to figure it out and just moved on to the next one. Yay for choice?
There were also some issues where it would completely crash randomly. I have no idea what caused this since it was a generic error message, but it only rarely happened with fluxbox.
Also, openbox exists but I have not tried it.
Another Windows-like UI. Honestly, there is almost no difference in UI from Fluxbox. Bonus is that window resizing works as expected, but still, the programs list is awful. Most of the time I launch programs from terminal anyway, but it could have much better defaults. Still the same program list shared among fluxbox, TWM, and icewm.
But hey, this one worked the best for me.
These are all the programs that do not cause serious performance issues
I used pcmanfm. It works fine.
Ok, this one is tricky. Chrome and Firefox explode on this because of RAM. There are a few text-based browsers like w3m that work very well but are limited. Falkon actually works. However, big sites usually have massive slow downs or do not work at all (Ex. Reddit). GitHub kind of works, YouTube works fine too, but they are very slow. But hey, you get what you can.
Standard music/video player. Works fine and doesn’t explode computer
Good image viewer. Yummy.
This is the best PDF viewer ever. VIM like bindings are nice and it renders very fast. Suprisingly light.
If you need an IME this one works fine. It did need some special environment variables which I think is on the Arch wiki. On some systems this thing can be horrible to set up or it just works. It’s kind of a guessing game. (Unrelated by on KDE Plasma 6 its borked)
