Raspberry Pi 4: Chronicling the Desktop Experience – Week 1

Last Updated on April 12, 2020

This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.

The purpose of the blog is two-fold. Primarily, it’s to share my experiences using the RPI4 purely as a desktop replacement machine, to see what works well, and what doesn’t. It’s also to act as an aide-mémoire for myself.

Along the way, I’ll be exploring what I’m looking for from a desktop machine. Smooth running multimedia, office based software, email, networking, and productivity apps are all high on my list of priorities. Rest assured, even though I am a huge advocate of the Pi range of computers, I’ll be brutally honest in my critique of RPI4. For example, the RPI4 is marketed as an energy efficient computer. In a way that’s very true. The Pi consumes a mere 2.8 watts when idle and about 5w when maxing out all 4 cores. But the firmware doesn’t automatically switch off the monitors’ backlight. Instead, it only blanks the screen. While there are plans to fix this issue (part fix with a working vcgencmd), it’s a startling omission. With inadequate power management of the monitors, it’s hard to consider the Pi 4 as an energy efficient desktop solution.

What makes the Pi 4 potentially a desktop replacement? For starters, it has a 64-bit quad core processor, dual-display support up to 4K, hardware video decoding, dual band wireless LAN, Bluetooth, gigabit ethernet, and two USB 3.0 ports. There are variants with 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of RAM. I’m using the 4GB model only.

If you’ve been following my articles published on LinuxLinks, you’ll know I’ve written a plethora of reviews about Linux music players. There’s so many available, but I’ve still reviewed many of the less mainstream open source players that are currently under active development. It’s therefore inevitable I’ll start with a few multimedia apps on the Pi 4 to kick off this series. But before I do, I’ll make a few recommendations from a multimedia (and desktop) perspective.

• Stick to Raspbian as your operating system. There are other interesting Linux/Pi-based operating systems available that are desktop friendly, but many lack the maturity of Raspbian. And Raspbian is the official operating system of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It’s an unofficial port of Debian wheezy armhf.
• For the best desktop experience, I strongly recommend running Raspbian with an SSD connected to one of the USB 3 ports. It’s a big step-up from running the system using a microSD card. Currently, RPI4’s firmware doesn’t support USB booting although there are plans to add support in the future. But it’s still possible to run Raspbian (or other distro) with an SSD over USB 3.0 as long as the /boot partition resides on the microSD card. Experienced Linux users will be able to set this up in 10 minutes. But for many, it isn’t trivial to configure if you’ve never done it before, so I’ll cover this procedure in a future blog.
• I ran into a number of issues with Pulseaudio installed. On balance, it’s best not to install Pulseaudio.

CLI-based multimedia apps

Let’s take a look at a couple of multimedia apps. The first, musikcube, is my favorite CLI-based music player. musikcube isn’t in the Raspbian repository so you can’t install it with the command:

The developer does provide packages for the Raspberry Pi. But the package for release 0.65.0 wouldn’t install with RPI4 due to incompatible libraries. As the source code is available, I cloned the project’s GitHub repository, and tried to compile it. This was almost successful, failing at the final linking stage of compilation. I opened an issue on the project’s repository, and the developer promptly offered a tweak (use ‘-latomic’ linker flag). This fixed the linking error, enabling the software to compile. He’s already rolled out a commit to musikcube’s GitHub. That’s what I love about open source and their developers.

I’m not going to run any synthetic benchmarks on the RPI4 in this blog. But I will occasionally post some real world test results.

The chart below shows the time it takes to compile musikcube with the RPI4 and with a run-of-the-mill quad-core Intel Core i5 machine. Of course, the result is not a strict comparison, for example the RPI4 and Core i5 are not running the same version of gcc and other software. But it does illustrate a few useful insights in the real world.

First, when compiling software on a multi-core CPU, don’t forget to use make with the the -j flag, as it’ll will significantly reduce the compile time. Second, the RPI4 completed the test about 3 times slower than the Core i5 using a single core, and slightly less than 4 times slower when using all cores. I think the RPI4 did really well in this comparison, and bodes well.

The tests were run from an SSD on both machines. The tests were repeated using a high-quality microSD card on the RPI4 which added about 20 seconds to the tests. I also ran make -j 5 as there is a school of though that -j should take number cores + 1. But running the tests with -j 5 made negligible difference.

From limited testing, musikcube runs without issues on the RPI4. It’s an extremely frugal and well written piece of software consuming minimal system resources: around 35MB of RAM and 3.0% CPU of 1 core (reported by ps_mem and top respectively).

(29 Oct) UPDATE: The developer has now released version 0.70.0 with a package for the RPI4.

I also tried out another CLI-based music player called cmus. Unlike musikcube, cmus is available in the Raspbian repository. You can either install it at the command-line with apt, or with Raspbian’s graphical package manager, PiPackages.

Either way, the application wouldn’t start, the command cmus eliciting no response at the terminal. The solution was to create a new config file to get the app running.

I’ve not had time to put cmus thoroughly through its paces yet, but it plays music from my samba shares with the RPI4.

PiPackages

As I mentioned PiPackages above, I’ll say a few words about this application, which is pre-installed with Raspbian. PiPackages is based on Packages, a package manager for GNOME. I’ve used many package managers over the years, but never one based on Packages.

As package managers go, PiPackages works reasonably well. I’m not impressed with the user experience though. For example, having the description above the package name simply makes it harder to look through the package list. It looks cluttered. There’s a few other niggles, but the package log is genuinely useful, showing when specific packages were installed.

Closing Comments

This first edition of my blog is a taster for what’s to come. Most of this week I’ve spent installing a few distributions on the RPI4 rather than testing desktop software. For next week, I’ll cover music players in more detail.

If you have any desktop apps you’d like me to try on the RPI4, please drop a comment below.

Read all my blog posts about the RPI4.

This blog is written on the RPI4.