[gkya]

Do you reckon a recent RPi is good enough for Emacsing away, with the occasional PDF-reading and watching videos w/ mpv? I think having a desktop computer with a wider monitor would be a nice improvement for me, given using a laptop for long times is not really ergonomical. If I can have a decent enough desktop experience with such a setup, that'd be very nice.

[lphnull]

Emacs? yes. Terminal work is enjoyable on the pi.

PDF? PDFs and the web will be laggy unless you set up a compositor like Compton to speed things up. There's enough GPU power in the PI to set up decent 2d compositing with transparencies.

Videos? I wouldn't count on it because youtube videos are still choppy for me. Even after a ton of work, I still get light choppiness on 320p video. I haven't tried local video files yet, though I assume local files might perform better than web videos. I mean, gifs and webms play smoothly without choppiness, so why not mpv video?

One of the biggest flaws in the raspberry pi is the USB Micro port. If your USB micro cable is broken and unreliable, then your PI will get extremely slow and may even crash a lot due to the flickering power supply. Your pi won't tell you what's wrong either, which makes troubleshooting a pain until you figure out that the lightning bolt icon on your screen means power problem.

If you like linux and tinkering, I would highly recommend you get a pi. Just don't expect a pi to work out of the box. Most distros are so bloated and the pi is so limited, that you have to trim everything down for the pi to be even remotely enjoyable.

If you wish to send me a download link to an example video file of yours, I can play it on my setup for you and let you know how well the video performs.

[gkya]

Thanks a lot! I'm quite comfortable with Gnu/Linux and FreeBSD, and I do have a Pi, though it sits there on the shelf running a couple cron jobs and being a CUPS server. I've never tried it for desktop computing tho (I don't think I've ever used it unless through ssh). I'll definitely test it out when I have a monitor handy (I'll either use a Pi or connect the monitor to my laptop, I really need a screen at my eye level, I'm fed up with the neck aches because I was too caught up with reading a paper, or more often, fiddling with my emacs config).

WRT PDFs and web, I use qutebrowser w/o JS, which is lightweight, and most PDFs are just papers with nothing fancy (I'm a humanities student / prospective researcher). I can take the choppyness if it's not unusable.

The videos are just any video on Youtube. Mpv is a program similar to mplayer, and I use it to watch any video on the disk or use it like "mpv <youtube url>" to view videos from youtube (it even has titles and can show progress, really nice), I guess you mistook it for a video format.

[jiggunjer]

How come you have trouble with 320 when people are using them to watch HD movies with kodi?

[blacksmith_tb]

I find Pi64[1] to be a decent improvement over Ubuntu on the RPi 3 (haven't tried it on one of the shiny new ones, though).

1: https://github.com/bamarni/pi64

[gkya]

Thanks. I'd probably put FreeBSD on it though. I can't use it because I can't get suspend and resume working on laptops, but I miss it like Odysseus misses Ithaka. One of the few software I actually love, it is...