Its definitely getting more usable with each generation but still not at the performance level during general use as an old i5 mini pc or N100. It always feels to me that there's a bottleneck with the Rpis that hold it back more than the cpu benchmarks suggest.

The SD card disk slows things down a lot. The rpi 5 lets you use a PCIe disk.

I sourced a 16GB Optane in the 2242 form for $20, but if you get a full size adapter the 2280 Optane is less than $5 on eBay for a 16GB Optane drive that will run the heavy Raspbian image with plenty of room and swap.

david@liqueur:~ $ df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/nvme0n1p2 13G 4.8G 7.3G 40% /

david@liqueur:~ $ swapon -s

Filename Type Size Used Priority

/var/swap file 204784 0 -2

Sure the adapter introduce a cost, but even a used Optane drive is going to have better reliability, in addition to the mentioned performance, than a new SDcard; so pay $5.

In my experience memory is very slow on the RPis... I'm talking factor if 10 improvements by getting rid of copies.

For video decoding on the GPU, processing on the same GPU memory in place and then displaying takes significantly less work than decoding on the CPU copying to the GPU and doing the rest their and most of the time is in the copy.

Not sure - I haven’t tried the 5 and my 4 (8gb SKU) no longer has a desktop environment on it. I put it on the wall next to the tele for use with VirtualHere (low-latency controller connection) on Ubuntu for a Moonlight game streaming setup. Which I think is an excellent use-case for it (although wildly over-provisioned on RAM).

Yeah I was thinking of the 500 in the context of a good kid’s machine. The portability is definitely a plus, although if you’re having to pack a display and a power cable anyway, I think I would (and will, since I happen to be looking for something right now) just go with a Beelink S12 or similar. The kid can do some light gaming on it then, too. The 400 keyboard doesn’t look particularly nice to type on either, tbh.