It's so cute (to look at)!
But it seems to be utterly useless for just about anything I thought I might be able to do with it..
This 4 gigabyte memory, almost 2 ghz quadcore machine seems unable to do much of anything, browsing the web is an utterly horrid experience..
Playing a game of Quake 3 is impossible.
Doom can run, but only at 320x240 unless you don't mind terrible lags.
I'm considering what I can do with it.. For once, I can run an IRC client on it, but what else?
Have you found something to actually use this for?
Their complaint is that Calc sometimes lags/hangs with a few thousand rows of heavily formatted data (they're not a data scientist, but still need to deal with government-issued xls[x] files). It wasn't a serious problem though and a great opportunity to "look under the hood" of what was happening and introduce them to CSV files. The other "problem" is that online shopping websites are often horribly slow, but again, I'd say there's a lesson in there and it could be viewed as a feature.
So all in all I am a huge fan. I think it's a great way to onboard people on good-enough-computing and open source. There is something magical about its form factor that resonates with "non-technical" people. Also quite cheap and accessible.
You are also one of the few that specifically gives a use case for the pi 400 (basically a Keyboard with a pi inside [0]), not just a normal pi, which I think has many other use cases (more server-y). The pi 400 is a desktop computer indeed.
[0]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
I find the consistent use of the plural "they/their" really jarring and for some reason it stands out even more than normal in this post. I hope this fad will pass and people will finally accept that it is fine to say "he" or "she" again like has been done for centuries without problems. Considering that acceptance of differences - between male and female, between heterosexual and homosexual, between religious and secular, between "white" and "black" and between any other potential identity category - has been the focus of society for the past half century it is counterproductive (to say the least) to suddenly start hiding behind plural pronouns. This trend is even stranger when considering the fact that it has become fashionable to explicitly proclaim membership of other identity categories.
Language changes. Get used to it. Or not, but it will anyway.
Thanks to generous donations, we've provided thousands of these devices to children all over the UK, to enable them to access education, especially important during the pandemic. Providing an affordable computing platform was always the aim.
You can learn more and donate here - https://www.raspberrypi.org/support-learn-at-home/
Disclaimer - I work for The Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Anyhow, I purchased it as a solution waiting for a problem, and I'm trying to find the problem with this post. I didn't mean to come across as overly negative, making such a product for the price point it has, is an achievement no doubt.
However, one can buy used "conventional" computers that are far more powerful than the pi, if one wishes a "cheap desktop computer".
What's attractive about the 400 is the formfactor and, well, it's something new to play with.. I'm truly trying to find out what to do with it, what the things are, where it'd be neat to have this tiny machine, that is totally silent, and can be always-on, probably next to my battlestations for a new usecase that I'd not want to reserve an entire workstation for.
So yea, sorry about the rant, but I'm asking this question not as a way to put down the 400, but to hear what people have used theirs for.
I've written up the details here: https://davidbieber.com/projects/go-note-go/
"Headless note-taking" means there's no monitor. I just type my notes or speak them (I've attached a beautiful handheld button I can push to start an audio recording). The notes are stored on-device until an internet connection becomes available. At that point, the notes are automatically transcribed and uploaded to my central note-taking system. For me that's Roam Research, but Go Note Go also supports RemNote, IdeaFlow, Notion, and Mem, and adding others is easy.
I find this super useful for jotting down thoughts about audiobooks while driving, and for capturing those late-night thoughts when camping or drifting off to sleep.
I also have a little abandoned side project where I used a Pi + spare monitor to display contextual information. My shell prompt passes data to a python script, which connects to the Pi and sends commands to Sway to display something contextually appropriate depending on what I'm doing.
So for instance if I move to a directory with a git repo, it'll show me the git log, and if the branch is named after a ticket in the bug tracker, it'll add a pane with the corresponding info. In an idle state it shows the chat and mail client.
This made sense at the time since I didn't have a way to hook up a second external monitor to that laptop anyway, and the overall idea of having a display that anticipated my likely needs a lot of the time was useful. Covid kind of put a stop to that since my home setup is quite different, but I still might pick it back up.
I literally just installed the official operating system, following the official instructions and installed both pieces of software from the official package repositories.
For Quake3, you may have to change the renderer to opengl1 or try q3lite. See https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=247841
(I have not tried Q3 myself but I know it can run, it even runs on RPi1. There are videos on youtube)
I use it to make sure my desktop software is not too heavy (if all of our tools can’t run on the rpi400 then it should not be mandatory for everyone in the company to run them.)
1. I use it as a wifi access point with hostapd. Where i live net is shared with many residents. This way my devices are isolated from others.
2. I portforward ssh from main wifi router to rpi, when im not at home i can ssh into it and use it at as poor's man vpn - handy at airports/pubs..
3. Its attached to tv via hdmi, i can watch youtube/twitch with it fairly ok (better then most "smart tvs" anyway with ff and ublock).
4. It serves as a "backup", i have usb 1tb hd and some scripts that mirror my github/gitlab repos, this is more as a precaution then as its "real" backup, but if i ever need it i could make it better with md raid i guess.
So, with all above, its a nice device to have for me at least, its not wasted 50-60e :)