Using an old Raspberry Pi to boost your productivity | Linux

Context: I tutor basic coding to people privately and semi-privately. Lately I’ve had more of the semi-privately (2 or 3 or 4 students at a time) classes, so I set up a projector in my officetel so that the students could all easily see my screen without craning their necks. Instead of hooking up a laptop or desktop to the projector, I found it more convenient to hook up an old Raspberry Pi with a wireless keyboard and mouse.

Specifically it’s the original Raspberry Pi 1 B. For those who don’t remember the old Raspberry Pi 1 Bs, the specs are:

• Single-core 700MHz ARM (roughly comparable to a 300MHz Pentium II)
• 512MB RAM, shared with video (about 430MB available)
• HDMI out
• USB 2.0 and an SD reader

Since the students aren’t doing games or working with huge data sets or anything, I thought it would be perfectly adequate for showing off basic programming principles. So far I’ve been right.

Today I was curious about how it would fare as a modern desktop. I got reddit loaded, plus a couple other tabs, with only about 1/2 of the RAM used up. Everything on the machine is pretty much stock Raspbian: e.g., LXDE with GNOME Web (née Epiphany) as the web browser.

Some things to note:

• reddit is unusable. The CPU seems to be the bottleneck. Maybe another browser (dillo?) would improve things a little bit, but probably not much. Just trying to scroll or click a link requires several seconds to register.
• Flashy, fancy sites (e.g., YouTube, Facebook) are unusable
• Simpler, content-focused websites (e.g., DDG, man pages) load quickly
• Developing small-to-medium projects is smooth. Compiling takes maybe triple the usual amount of time, but on small projects, that’s only going to be a second or two, anyway
• Basic sysadmin tasks (e.g., installing packages, moving files around) is slow (the old SD card I have in there is dog slow) but works fine if you let it finish in the background while doing something else.
• Obviously not suitable for media-intensive work (e.g., photo editing, video, audio)

Trying to use it as a desktop, I found a sense of nostalgia, like I was mentally transported back to the late 1990s, that magical time when you could accomplish a lot, but your actions had to be deliberate when using a computer. The computer’s more than fast enough if you need to be productive and you know exactly what you’re trying to do.

What it can’t do is let you dick around (to use the technical term). Want to waste time on reddit or YouTube or clicking around on news sites and angry blogs? Too bad! Your experience will vary from frustratingly slow to flat-out impossible. Your computer’s now for coding, searches for specific information, and document-editing only!

So, I just thought it was cool and wanted to share the experience. If you ever feel like your productivity is slipping away, or you want your use of your computer time in a more deliberate way, considering using an old Raspberry Pi or some old piece of junk you have collecting dust. (As a bonus, my students are awed by it)