I have a Raspberry Pi 2 I’m using as a simple headless web server to experiment with things. When I first got it, I connected it up and used it a little as a work station, but I found it to be too slow.
I’ve heard the Raspberry Pi 3 is more powerful, twice the power maybe? Anyway, is anyone using it as a workstation for web browsing and word processing and is happy with it?
I’m asking because I have a spare monitor, keyboard and mouse and was thinking of using it to put a light use workstation.
When I had a laptop [del]shit the bed[/del] failed to recover after a windows update, I used an R.Pi3 as my main light-duty surfing (The Dope & Youtube mostly) computer for about 6 or 9 months before I finally replaced it with a real laptop.
I found I could have at most two to three chrome browser tabs open at a time. I never did any heavy word processing on it, but it should handle google docs online and simple text editing. I wouldn’t write a novel on it.
My main workhorse computer is a linux box running Debian so the R.Pi’s environment wasn’t an issue for me. Ultimately the lack of speed and lack of power (even for light web browsing) drove me to getting something better.
tl,dr: It’ll do until you can get a better machine.
Do get the Pi 3 mB. It’s faster. 1.2 Ghz quad core and 1 gig mem and microSD for storage. With the Linux OS like Raspbian it makes a mighty little PC. All you had to do was download NOOBS (w/Raspbian).
I just got me one for my game console project. I did not buy a kit but separate better stuff like the Nintendo case and heatsink/fan assembly. Also a better PSU. My Retropie OS and game roms hasn’t come in yet so I downloaded NOOBS and installed it on my 32 gig microSD card.
There’s a lot of comparing apples to oranges to raspberries in benchmark testing, but ideally a Pi3b is at best ~Pentium 4 1.7GHz cpu. But the Pi has quite a few limitations so I consider ~750MHz Pentium a fairer comparison.
As noted, multitasking is not the best on a Pi. Floating point is another issue.
Simple web pages no problem. But there’s a lot of unfortunately heavy-load sites out there.
HTML 5 and javascript have dramatically increase the memory footprint of browsers, and the disk performance is pretty low on the raspberry pi 3.
It will work, but I would expect it to feel laggy as it is not uncommon for a website to eat up 250MB+ of resident memory these days due to the 1 GiB of ram.
It has Chromer which is a scaled down browser for mobile phones. Works quite well. You can’t expect it to compare to desktops and laptops but for $35 it can get you on.
