Posted on: 2024-06-21
If you've looked at any IT news within the last years you can see that there is a clear direction towards ARM systems. x86 will never be gone [citation needed], but more and more powerful ARM based systems are making their way onto the market. In times of ever rising energy prices and awareness of CO2 production, it's hard to ignore the power saving attributes of ARM chips. Apples M1 surely had a big role in this. Any major player in the IT infrastructure department also offers ARM based virtual servers.
So back in 2018 I've already made some experiments with an ARM notebook, the Teres-1. Its performance is .. well .. lacking. It's quite a nice device for writing text and doing light sysadmin work. I took it with me while I was camping once since it can run off a small solar panel. (Did I mention ARMs are efficient?) But otherwise it's mostly collecting dust due to being slow and difficult to upgrade the software.
Last year however the Raspberry Pi 5 came out and changed everything. It can't be compared directly to the Teres as it's not in a laptop form factor. But it does have a 64 bit ARM processor as the Teres and it's much faster. I already had some issues with my Desktop PC, a Core i5 from 2015, so I thought I'll try swapping it out with the Pi 5 and ... well, it just works! I've had it as my main "PC" for 5 months now, so I thought I'll write an article about it. There are much faster ARM systems available but not at a price I'm willing to pay.
Hardware
For a Desktop replacement only the 8GB RAM version makes sense. I'm not sure why the Raspberry foundation has even released models with less RAM. In my opinion this should be the absolute minimum, then there should be 16GB and maybe 32GB versions. Afterall there's still the Pi 4 around with lower memory options. But that's not my decision to make... Don't even try to use an SD-Card as main storage as it's way too slow. First I had a USB3 SATA Adapter with an SSD attached which worked OK, but for an extra speed boost I've switched to an NVMe SSD on an NVMe Hat after a month. It's running at PCIe 3.0 speeds without any issues. With the disk swap I also added an active cooler as it got a bit too toasty with the just the passive heatsink when CPU and GPU are maxed out.
Software
Software support has also much improved so most things can simply be installed from the repositories. I've used a standard Raspberry Pi OS image but swapped out the LXDE Desktop for XFCE as I use it on my other machines. It now looks pretty much indistinguishable to a "normal" Desktop PC.
I can use VSCode, KiCad and Netbeans with no issues at all, the performance is quite snappy. Also Jitsi Meetings and video playback through VLC, mplayer or just the browser work fine. For some reason LibreOffice lags a bit but this is manageable. I use Brave as my primary browser for which ARM binaries are provided as well.
What I can really recommend is installing Pi-Apps as it simplifies the installation of more "complicated" packages. I'm not a big fan of containerized Desktop applications but I use Flatpak as well since it has first class support for ARM, so all packages are available for this processor architecture as well. If you can't find something in the Debian repositories, I recommend looking at Pi-Apps first, then Flathub.
Running Windows Software
Yes, it's actually possible to run (some) Windows programs on the Pi. It only requires wine and box64 to be installed through Pi-Apps. The binfmt registration doesn't work 100% correctly so I have to call box64 wine SomeProgram.exe instead of just the exe-File, but that's good enough. I use wine to run AnyDesk for occasional "friends and family" IT support as the native Raspberry Pi version doesn't run for some reason. The emulated Windows Version however works just fine. Through box64 and wine I can also run my old version of Eagle if I need to review old projects or this one Delphi program I wrote back in 2007 which I need exactly once a year for one client.
Gaming
That's the only area where the setup falls a bit short :/ .. I couldn't get Steam to run on it and even if it ran, due to the x86 emulation the performance of any game would probably be terrible. Of course there's the assortment of small games which come with Debian and browser based games but that's about it. Except - it does run Minecraft Java edition. The "Prism Launcher" can be installed through Pi-Apps. Minecraft runs at around 20-25fps with graphics dialed all the way down. While this is not perfect, it's good enough for some peaceful non-competitive gaming.
Future outlook
As someone who set up his first Linux PC in 1999 and uses it almost exclusively sind the late naughties, I'm quite used to tinkering around with Linux systems. Compared to the early days, this was a breeze! But if you're not that experienced or simply don't want to spend time on various workarounds I'd recommend sticking with a regular x86 PC for now.
But who knows? New ARM devices are coming up left and right. There's the Rock Pi which blows the Pi 5 away in performance. I'm a bit skeptical about the long term software support however so I'm sticking with the Pi. Tuxedo, a German notebook manufacturer will release an ARM-based notebook late this year, which contains a Qualcomm chipset.
Maybe this time it will finally be the year of the Linux Desktop.