Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB - Dev Workstation - Performance & Review

The Computer:

Single-board computers, what I'd once personally brushed off and completely ignored as little more than a child's learning toy, has now completely replaced my Windows 10 laptop with WSL2 for everything from software development to general usage: from web browsing to checking my email, from debugging my latest project shameless plug to resizing images. This little computer has really impressed me, especially since overclocking the quad-core CPU from a meager 1.5GHz to a still stable 2.0GHz!

With the case, fan, and heat-sinks the cooling has been no issue whatsoever and the computer runs with the same steady purr for a week straight with no noticeable drop off or change in performance. Be it the lightweight Linux system, nature of single-board systems, or state of modern computing but I find that rather impressive considering that computers in the past would get memory leaks or crash after just hours of up-time.

Performance:

Unfortunately the 64-bit version of the OS it ships with, Rasberry OS or formerly Raspbian, a Debian distribution, is still in beta development. However, with the 32-bit version of Rasberry OS Lite, along with a window manager and desktop environment, I've managed to run upon the most stable and light-weight system I've ever worked with to date and it rarely idles above 1GB of ram usage, even after I left it idling for a week to test for memory leaks! It can handle Chrome and even has support for VS Code via a community project, has support for image editing through an open-source project, 3D modeling even with Blender! Plus office support through nothing else but Libre Office.

There are some occasional slow-downs or catches, generally when the window browser grows cluttered and multiple applications are running like VS Code and Libre Office, however, in those scenarios there is almost always something I can close down to bring the system back to a reasonable speed. Surprisingly it's amazingly plug-and-play as well and getting started with the system took less than thirty minutes flat, and has given me no trouble whatsoever with any devices whatsoever.

Conclusion:

For a Linux workstation, primarily for development and related needs, this smol device has been incredibly more than I expected, I'd highly recommend it and have already ordered two more for use as other devices in my home. The guide I followed to get the Raspberry Lite OS along with a window manager and desktop environment can be found here, it's definitely worth taking a glance at as they do a very detailed benchmark of various environment setups and their performances. Various options are available from headless environments to full or lite versions of OS's, if anyone out there has OS recommendations or is running something particularly suited to the device please do reach out!

Never in my life did I think I'd consider replacing what I once used an entire full-sized desktop computer for with a computer that is the size of my wallet. It really shows how far computers have come over time and I'm really looking forward to trying out other single-board computers out there!


All The Best and Happy Tinkering!
By, Alice Williams