Sunday, January 11, 2026

The Computer Improvements Continue

It was nice to get an HDMI switch and a USB switch installed so that I can move from my Oumax "daily driver" mini PC to my Raspberry Pi 4B by pressing two buttons instead of changing keyboards, changing mice, and manually switching monitor input settings.

Nice enough that when I needed to add some things to my Amazon Haul cart to reach the $25 minimum (I was getting some household necessaries and they'd been sitting in the cart for several days), I decided to buy a second HDMI switch and a micro-HDMI to HDMI adapter so that I can run the Pi in dual display mode by pressing three buttons instead of two buttons. Those will arrive some time this week.

After doing some research on CPU loads, temperatures, etc., I also moved the Pi from Manjaro Linux with XFCE as its GUI to the latest release of Raspberry Pi OS, a Debian-based Linux using the PIXEL GUI (a variant of LXDE). In addition to making more efficient use of resources because it's optimized specifically to the Pi, not just to the ARM CPU, its command line interface is more familiar to me than Manjaro's Arch Linux CLI.

Right now, whenever I have a few spare moments, I'm working on getting the Pi set up as a full backup work rig so that if the Oumax takes a shit I'm back up and running immediately rather than having to break out one of my old mini PCs or wait for a new one to arrive.

I'm also thinking about Pi upgrades -- switching from the standard SD card storage to a USB solid state drive would massively increase its read/write speeds and reduce latency. I might even go ahead and get a Pi 5 with 16Gb of RAM. I don't think those changes would get it quite up to the Oumax's benchmarks, but it's just fun to have a viable working computer (the 4B was my "daily driver" for a little while) the size of a pack of cigarettes.

Update: I decided to have a look at USB solid state drives and found a very good sale on one that reviewers say works great with their Raspberry Pi machines. So that's on the way. I'll probably put off further futzing within the OS until it arrives, as I'll plan on burning a fresh OS image to the SSD and booting from that in the future.

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