Raspberry Pi 4, Week 4 Update

It's been more than three weeks since I made the switch from a Lenovo ThinkCentre with 16Gb of RAM and quad-core AMD CPU to a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 Gb of RAM and a quad-core ARM CPU.

I'm still happy.

Since changing machines, I've switched from Chromium as my default browser to Vivaldi, a Chromium fork developed by some people formerly associated with Opera. I'm happy with that too.

I'm a little unhappy with my user interface at the moment. I was happy with the default Raspbian GUI, but my son convinced me to install and switch to XFCE. That happened this afternoon. I don't know if the feeling of motion sickness I have is XFCE, or me coming down with some kind of bug, or low blood sugar, or what. I'm going to give XFCE a day and if I don't like it better I'll switch back.

If I was doing heavier-duty work, the Pi would probably not be up to the job. In fact, I switched to the ThinkCentre from a 4Gb Intel Celeron Chromebox because that seemed to be getting slow, presumably from OS update bloat, web sites having more memory-hogging gizmos on them, etc.

But while the Pi is observably slower than the ThinkCentre at rendering web pages, so far as I can tell it isn't slowing down my work, for the simple reason that I usually have browser tabs loading in the background while I work with already loaded tabs. I'm not sitting there waiting for a tab to load, a Wordpress post to publish, schedule, or update, etc., because I'm out of there and on something else as soon as I press a button.

The only hardware change I've done since getting things all set up has been adding a sub-$10 USB hub. The Pi has 4 USB ports, but they're all on one side of the machine, close together, and kind of hard to get to. The hub makes it easier to plug/unplug a flash drive, hardware key, etc.

A little research tells me I may be under-utilizing the machine. Right now, it is running a 32-bit version of Raspbian. The 64-bit version is still in beta. And some sites seem to indicate that with a 32-bit CPU, the Pi can only really use 3-4Gb of its 8Gb RAM. I don't know that for sure, but when I've pulled up a system monitor, it never seems to be using more than 3.x Gb. So when a 64-bit version of Raspbian is ready, I think I may get a performance improvement.

So, that's the update: Still happy. If you wanted to know, now you know.