I love this thing!
Oh, man – how could a thing the size of a pack of cigarettes with only 4 gigs of RAM piss all over my singing, dancing Windows 11 laptop? This thing goes like shit off a shovel. While its internal temperature is half that of my Asus (which, to be fair, runs really hot).
It came pre-loaded with the Raspberry Pi operating system on a micro-SD, which is vanilla Debian Linux with specs for this particular hardware. And everything else you need – Chrome, VLC media player, Libre Office. It even boots to an attractive looking desktop wallpaper rather then the command line – though the command line is there and my rusty Linux skills are slowly coming back to me.
It is, as you can see, a tangled mess of wires. ChatGPT said a Pi in this stage is like an exploded laptop. And that monitor is bigger than I expected (I am absolutely lousy at visualizing the size of things from internet descriptions) which means I do awkward lap juggling whenever anyone comes to the door.
But this is going to be so much fun.
p.s. Acknowledging Tim Carlson’s confession to being a pi-head (and The Neon Madman and Quasi). Are there discussion forums for Pi? Must be.
p.s. So sorry about the spam. I hadn’t cleaned it out over the weekend and I must’ve biffed about 50 earlier.
Posted: October 5th, 2026 under personal.
Comments: 6
Comments
Comment from Gordon R. Durand
Time: October 5, 2026, 7:17 pm
Want to make Chromium run even faster?
Chromium and Raspberry PI 4: Increase Performances with Cache on RAM Disk
https://peppe8o.com/chromium-and-raspberry-pi-4-increase-performances-with-cache-on-ram-disk/
As an added benefit, you clear your cache every time you reboot.
Comment from QuasiModo
Time: October 5, 2026, 9:51 pm
Learn your Linux terminal commands…if you were around during the DOS days, it’s not that scary 🙂
Here’s a Linux Cheat Sheet to get you started:
https://linuxbasecamp.com/cheat-sheets/linux
Here’s an advanced commands site where they do insanity with the terminal:
Comment from nbc
Time: October 6, 2026, 12:08 pm
@QuasiModo
Good links, thank you.
Comment from MrKnowitall
Time: October 6, 2026, 12:23 pm
And of course, you are now well on your way to running a dual-boot system on your laptop. Bazzite (a flavor of Linux) is a very good choice. It will not only run in a sprightly fashion, but is a good backstop in case of Windows coming unglued for whatever reason. If you can add a second SSD to your laptop for the purpose, that’s the best, but you can re-partition a large enough primary drive if needs must.
Bazzite is also a superb addition to desktop machines, especially older ones that don’t play well with Win 11.
Psssst! Are you running local LLMs under Ollama yet?
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: October 6, 2026, 3:06 pm
I have a version of Linux on my laptop. I forget which. The robot has encouraged me to install all kinds of command line stuff.
Comment from Rich Rostrom
Time: October 6, 2026, 9:59 pm
Because Windows is thoroughly enshittified by Microsoft’s monetizing. Linux is free of that.
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Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.<< carry me back to ol' virginny