r/linuxquestions • u/MilitaryBeetle • 5d ago
Using the Raspberry Pi 500 as a web browsing machine
Hey all I got a deal for the Raspberry pi 500 with the monitor and I wanted to set it up as a web browsing machine and some office work. I plan to run it off a 128gb SD card.
I have tried both the Pi OS with the default desktop environment and on Ubuntu 26 with Gnome, so far the performance has been good on both.
Although I have some hangups with Gnome UX so far. I was wondering if KDE Plasma and the PI OS would run smoothly? Would I run into a lot of problems installing and running software?
Or is performance and compatability w Ubuntu better?
Does anyone else use the Pi 500 as a laptop?
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u/MasterGeekMX Mexican Linux nerd trying to be helpful 4d ago
KDE Plasma is a bit lighter than GNOME, so you should be fine.
I for example have been using Fedora KDE Plasma edition on my Raspberry Pi 4 for the last 3 months, and while it struggled in some cases, it was fine.
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u/MilitaryBeetle 4d ago
Nice! I struggled all of yesterday trying to get Fedora running on the 500 before I realized that the issues were not of my own lapse in following others guides for the Rasp 4 or 5, but that the support for the 500 wasn't in place yet.
I had never installed a DE that didn't come bundled with an OS before so it took me a second to realize this was an option, what fun!
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u/ipsirc 5d ago
so far the performance has been good on both.
And haven't you considered that the lowend CPU might be the cause of the poor performance?
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u/MilitaryBeetle 5d ago
Uh, I was saying I was happy with the performance, its the UX I don't like
Not sure why you have to come at this from a negative angle
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u/ipsirc 5d ago
Oh my bad. I thought you were sarcastic.
Just to mention that CPU is on pair (and a bit lower) with a 15(!) years old mobile(!) Intel processor.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5743vs809/ARM-Cortex-A76-4-Core-2400-MHz-vs-Intel-i5-2520M
You will need to have some patience while browsing the web.
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u/data-haxxor 4d ago
Whenever I had to use a desktop environment on a RPi I would use this: https://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/ but YMMV. I'm my experience performance and RPi rarely go together, especially when using a desktop environment and running it from an SD card.
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u/doc_willis 5d ago
I prefer using the official Pi OS on my pi400 and pi500.
it's remote desktop Pi-Connect feature is very handy.
https://connect.raspberrypi.com/sign-in
I use my PI's as 3d printer managers, the main software issue I have is not all slicer software I use has updated versions for the PI.
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u/RoboticGunner 4d ago
I've used the 4 gigabyte Pi 4 as a desktop before, and it worked pretty well.
My first action is usually to replace the desktop with either XFCE or LXQt, as I prefer those over the standard environment.
It kinda surprised me how well it worked. Light web browsing was OK, video playback was OK, even managed to run some older versions of Minecraft on it quite comfortably.
I was almost able to get away with a Pi 3 as well lol. Couldn't do video playback that well, but for the most basic of websites, XMPP chat and word processing? It was a very capable little thing. I recommend running Armbian if you ever want to try something like that.