Raspberry Pi: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

This morning, I attempted a minor change of operating systems on the Raspberry Pi.

After multiple attempts to get the 64-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS to work (it had a "freezing up") problem, I recently switched to Manjaro Linux. I like it. Nice OS. But the version I chose was the one that comes with the KDE Plasma GUI, and I decided to reduce resource usage by switching to the XFCE GUI version.

So, I burned the Manjaro image to an SD card (the one that originally came with the Pi, on which the old 32-bit OS used to live), booted the computer up ... and got boot errors. No dice.

Which means I'm back to Manjaro with KDE. I may give it another try some time.

That's the first step back.

The second is that I am -- tentatively, at least -- switching back from the Vivaldi web browser to plain old Chromium.

I don't know if it's because I switched to the 64-bit OS, and therefore 64-bit build of Vivaldi, or if perhaps Vivaldi's updates are causing the software to get more demanding and less stable, but it no longer resembles what I wrote about it just a little over a year ago:

"Vivaldi (which is a Chromium-based attempt to re-create Presto-era Opera, which I did like pretty well) seems, so far, to load and render pages faster than Chromium on the Raspberry Pi. It seems to handle YouTube videos more quickly as well (less churning, quicker non-choppy play)."

The situation is now reversed: Chromium seems to be faster than Vivaldi. Additionally, with the latest "stable" update or three of Vivaldi, the browser has started pulling a weird crash thing. I'll try to close a tab. Instead of the tab closing, the browser will freeze for several seconds and then close. Not so often that it's not usable, but once or twice in a long day. Which is once or more twice than I like. If it was still noticeably faster than Chromium, I'd probably stick with it, but between the two things I'm done with Vivaldi for the moment. I may drop in on it from time to time to see if new updates have fixed the freeze/crash problem and if it's back to being fast, though.