Media elements, JavaScript, RAM limitations, difficult video rendering, and crashing limit its productivity.
Looking for ways to apply a new CCD to pi astrophotography recently, I made two mistakes: I didn't block ads and I opened more than two tabs.
The pi ended up in swap hell for over a minute before I restarted. This is an rpi4 4GB, OC'd with heatsinks and active cooling, on a good IOPS SD. Browsing the web is the only thing I've found that it routinely struggles with.
Swapping on the SD card is a nightmare. I found out that disabling the swap actually leads to a better experience, even if it means that firefox gets killed from time to time.
Would swap on zram work? I've used that to help with low-memory situations, but I'm not sure if the Pi's CPU is fast enough to avoid it being a different bottleneck.
Like other have said javascript makes it slow. sourcehut.org: great. twitter: unsuable. mastodon: barely. github: ok-ish. gmail: ko. protonmail: ko. I use a rpi400 with 4GB of RAM. I forgot to mention the builtin wifi does not work great. I am using Ethernet. I am using the rpi400 to write this message, and I have been using it for two weeks. I tried ubuntu 22.04, 64bit raspberry pi OS too. And I intend to keep using the rpi400, and build my projects on top of it.
Which is remarkable given how many older systems and software the pi can run natively or emulate at full speed. The web really can be embarassing in terms of performance.
It is awful, isn't it? I do wonder how many joules we waste on poorly performing web apps that could be made more efficient by applying less engineering rather than more.
As a javascript dev myself which write javascript heavy websites, I think all of my sites would perform just fine on a raspberry pi, at least on the newer models.
What I am most afraid of is the editing experience mostly.