My Impressions on Using a Raspberry Pi 4 as a Desktop Replacement

7 min readNov 14, 2020

Since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4, there have been a lot more people trying to use this microcomputer as their desktop PC. More recently, the Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer has been released, the name of which directly indicates its “main” purpose. I have long been interested in the possibility of using a portable and silent PC for simple tasks like creating this text, where the “full-size” desktop is redundant and the tablet is inconvenient. Finally, I bought a top-of-the-line Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of memory — it’s time to see how it works.
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By the way, this article was completely created on the Raspberry Pi, and it works well, I did not have any troubles or glitches.
Why the Raspberry Pi?

Of course, the motivations for using the Raspberry Pi can vary. Someone may need an inexpensive Linux desktop for learning. Someone may have no money at all for a full-fledged PC. I personally have long wanted to have a 100% silent and low-power computer to use as a media center and “typewriter”. Using the consuming 500 W power Core I7 desktop PC only to type this text looks a bit redundant for me, at least in terms of reducing the energy footprint (I don’t care about the electricity bill, I care about the environment). I tried using the Samsung DeX as a desktop, and the experience was generally very positive — for typing and watching videos on the big screen, my Samsung Galaxy S10 is powerful enough. But the number of software for Android that can work in desktop mode is limited, and not every website is displayed correctly using Android in “desktop” mode with mouse. And DeX is still Android — with many limitations of the smartphone-based operating system. Linux is another matter — complete freedom in terms of SSH access, installing any libraries, components, a fully functional terminal, USB, GPIO and hardware support. Sounds promising, let’s see how it works.
Before we’ll get started, an important note: to fully use the Raspberry Pi as a desktop, a good cooling is required. I wanted ho have a 100% fanless PC, so I bought this case:
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The case works actually well in terms of heat dissipation, even with a high load there was no overheating or system freezing. The case temperature did not exceed 50C even during stress tests:
As we know, a version of Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi has recently been released, and we will also test it. But first, it’s interesting to see the standard Raspbian, which has been familiar to DIY enthusiasts for many years.
Part I: Raspbian
Before we start, let me remind you of the Raspberry Pi 4 specs (the Raspberry Pi 400 has similar capabilities so that almost everything described below is also true for it):
CPU Quad Core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz
2, 4 or 8GB LPDDR4–3200 SDRAM memory
WiFi 2.4/5.0 GHz, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
Gigabit Ethernet port
2 USB 3.0 ports; 2 USB 2.0 ports
Support for 2 monitors, micro-HDMI connectors (up to 4kp60 resolution)
Support of H.265 (4kp60 decode), H264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode)
According to the description, everything looks fine. But the very first launch showed that the system works slowly. The solution is simple — the processor frequency needs to be increased. By default, the OS works in a “low power” mode — the Raspberry Pi comes with no heatsink at all, and at high computing power mode, the CPU will simply overheat. Solution: edit the config.txt file with the sudo nano /boot/config.txt command and uncomment two lines:

My Impressions on Using a Raspberry Pi 4 as a Desktop Replacement

Written by nishita jahras