Minimalist ARM week for desktop computing

[outlander]

I used a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Lenovo Tab M9 for all desktop needs for one week no Intel or AMD.

Mild photo editing, simple gaming, email, android debugging tools, internet surfing, video playback, music, banking and accounts, ect.

Honestly it worked perfectly, zero issues. Using Raspberry Pi OS Legacy 64-bit and it is really lightweight and fully functional, works every bit as well as a standard Linux operating system. The Lenovo tablet is fully degoogled of course

I'll keep using these things for now until I get bored and fire up one of my other Linux PC's.

 

[Rich]

I'll keep using these things for now until I get bored and fire up one of my other Linux PC's.

I’ve got this old Toshiba Tecra laptop , easily ten years old, probably older, that I was ready to toss in the recycling bin. On a whim, I decided to give it a second life and use it to try Linux. I downloaded Linux Mint, put it on a bootable USB stick, and to my surprise actually managed to get it installed.

Setting it up, though, has been a whole adventure. Nothing about it feels intuitive, and there’s no universe in which I could have done it without leaning heavily on AI for guidance. The amount of detailed, step‑by‑step information available is honestly remarkable. But once I got rolling, things started falling into place. I’ve got the printer working, installed LibreOffice, set up Thunderbird for email, added VLC for media, and even got my Surfshark VPN running. It’s turned into a genuinely enjoyable little project.

Surprisingly, this decade‑old Tecra running Linux is noticeably faster than my one‑year‑old Windows 11 laptop with a 20‑core i7. That alone makes the whole experiment worth it.

 

[MoBeans]

Raspberry Pi are amazing little devices for their size. So many uses for them. I was just reading in some music blog that someone disassembled a bunch of audiophile music streamers costing thousands of dollars and many of them had Raspberry Pis inside. I have collected then and have a 1 thru 5 and have used them for various projects over the years. The recent ones could be used for basic daily computing, the earlier ones not so much.