Raspberry Pi 3: Now a Legitimate Desktop Computer for $200!

The latest hardware offering from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Raspberry Pi version 3 crosses a major threshold. This new device is now a real computer capable of running a real, modern desktop operating system. I immediately pre-ordered one when I saw the specs: 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM processor, 1 GB RAM, built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, HDMI, 10/100 Ethernet and four USB ports.

When it arrived yesterday I tore my office and then a few other nooks apart looking for a Micro-SD card to burn a boot image onto. No luck. Unbelievable. I had to go the the Family Dollar store at 21:30 to buy the only card within 10 miles of my rural-suburban home at that time of day. Still, I got a couple SanDisk 8 GB cards for $10 each. It seems in today's world of portable electronics; Micro-SD cards are harder to hold onto than AA batteries. Armed with fresh media, I downloaded three or four operating systems of varying purpose and architecture.

Surprisingly, I learned Microsoft has jumped onto the “micro” bandwagon with a Windows 10 version sized for the Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 called “Windows 10 IoT” (Internet of Things). It is by far the easiest to install of all the Pi operating systems I’ve ever tried. With a Windows 10 PC, the .iso image Microsoft provides opens right up in Windows explorer and consists of a single .msi file. By simply right-clicking the .msi and selecting “Install”, an installer app puts everything you need to flash the IoT OS right onto your PC. It then launches a utility to partition, format and flash the OS onto the Micro-SD card. Unfortunately, that’s where the impressive stuff ends. Windows 10 IoT is a complete performance dog. When you first boot the Raspberry Pi 3 with your freshly-flashed card, you can go grab a cup of coffee and have a smoke while you wait for the Windows logo and the “wait” wheel to go away and for the IoT desktop to appear. When it finally does appear, there’s hardly anything there. IoT is little more than a minimal OS designed to facilitate side-loading of custom code onto the Pi. To do anything at all you will need a Windows 10 PC and the latest (and I mean latest) version of Visual Studio. The IoT OS (if you could even call it that) does little more than discover the display, keyboard, mouse and network adapter then display a few tutorials on connecting to the Pi remotely and side-loading code. If it weren’t so easy to install I’d be really pissed. Still, that’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back.

The next OS I tried was the official “Raspbian Jessie” Linux release. This is the latest Linux distro coded specifically for the Raspberry Pi by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. While not nearly as automatic as Windows 10 IoT installer, the foundation’s web site has detailed installation instructions for Mac, Windows and Linux. Every Raspbian (a meld of Raspberry and Debian) version I’ve ever used works really well. The foundation does a good job putting Linux on a diet to 1.) pare down its physical size for smaller SD cards, 2.) strip out unnecessary code like unneeded hardware drivers and 3.) optimize the OS for the Raspberry Pi’s minimal ARM architecture. I’ve always found Raspbian to be the best “all-round” OS for the Pi (versions 1 & 2), blending a usable and familiar GUI with fast and stable Linux underpinnings. Is Raspbian the fastest? No. Is it the prettiest? Uh-uh, but it will turn the $35 Raspberry Pi into a quite usable computer. Don’t misunderstand, you won’t be editing video or playing Call of Duty with it, but editing documents with the included Libra Office Suite, getting email and surfing are well within the Pi’s reach when running Raspbian. The downside? Raspbian is pretty boring. It certainly isn’t what one would call “aesthetically pleasing” and its one-off GUI won’t run many popular Linux apps (even ones designed for Debian). If, however, you don’t expect too much, a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian is a quite serviceable computer and there are tons of project resources within the Raspbian community to turn your $35 Pi into anything from a weather station to a web server, but as a useable day-to-day desktop OS; it ain’t there yet.

I had a Micro-SD card with the latest Raspbian release running on a Pi v2, so I popped it out and fired up the v3 with it. I instantly noticed a huge speed increase just watching the boot sequence scroll. It was a blur! The text shot by so fast I couldn’t read a single line of it. So you say, “Big whoop, MacTexan. It’s just a bunch of text on the screen. What’s the big deal with that?” Well, it is a bunch of text, but each line is confirmation of some portion of the kernel loading, so it is a good indicator of how fast things are happening. I didn’t do a comparative stopwatch test between the v2 & v3, but subjectively the v3 booted much, MUCH faster. Once booted, I undid all the GUI optimization I could think of and the v3 Pi performed flawlessly. I set the windows to “show content while moving and resizing”, turned on all the 3D buttons and window shading Raspbian had to offer and the v3 continued to sing. Next, I opened Chromium. I had all but stopped using it on the v2 because it performed so poorly, but on the v3 it runs (almost) like Chrome on my iMac. Time to turn up the heat.

BY FAR, the best operating system I’ve tried on the Raspberry Pi is Ubuntu MATE 16.04. I’ve come to this conclusion only recently. In fact, I tried MATE 15.10 on a Raspberry Pi 2 last year and while I loved its features and looks, it ran like a three-legged dog going uphill. The version 2 Pi just didn’t have the chops to host the OS. Boot times were slow, but not painfully so, but there were significant lags when launching apps and clicking in general. There’s nothing more confusing than trying to navigate an OS when the hardware can’t keep up. All too often I would click the same button twice thinking I’d missed it the first time, only to have my second click do something I didn’t intend. In reality, I didn’t miss the button, the Pi just wasn’t responding in a reasonable time. That’s no longer the case with the Raspberry Pi 3.

I downloaded and burned the latest version of Ubuntu MATE (16.04) onto a new 8 gig Micro-SD card. Based on my experience with MATE 15 on the Pi v2, when I plugged it into the v3 and powered up, I expected things to be a bit slower than Raspbian. After all, Raspbian comes from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and is optimized specifically for the Pi. Ubuntu MATE is a general purpose (albeit built for lesser hardware than the standard Ubuntu distro) operating system replete with a beautiful GUI, tons of utilities and a full suite of apps. There’s nothing “stripped down” about it. Case in point: When running MATE, the little v2’s CPU stayed pegged virtually the whole time I was doing anything on the machine. Not so with the v3. In most circumstances, Ubuntu MATE feels as responsive on the Pi3 as Ubuntu 14.04 does running on my 2.4 GHz. Core 2 Duo Dell Optiplex. In fact, the only way I’ve been able to bog it down is by playing a 720p movie (.mp4) using VLC while simultaneously streaming a 720p vid from YouTube. I know. Who does that, right? Nobody. Except maybe some silly guy in Texas trying to flog his computer ‘till something breaks. Point is, nothing broke. Playing two HD movies at once had the CPU running at 95 – 100%, but the little machine did it without stuttering either vid. Admittedly, the frame rate was just a little off and I couldn’t do much else while this was going on, but who could complain about that? The fact that my $35 computer the size of an Altoids tin will decode two HD video streams at once is something just short of miraculous!

So, stress test passed, I move on to more normal activities. I played around with a number of MATE’s myriad GUI skins, choosing the ones I thought most likely to burn CPU cycles. While some were more burdensome than others, it was only a couple of CPU percent. It's really easy to measure since MATE includes all the latest Ubuntu system monitoring apps including the handy panel widgets. It also includes a sort-of parent app called Control Center which provides an organized view of shortcuts to all the MATE system tweaks. It reminds me of the Windows “Control Panel” of yesteryear. Well, I say yesteryear. It’s still there in Windows 10, you just have to dig for it. To the point, MATE’s Control Center is a succinct grouping of everything one needs to fiddle with settings ‘till your heart’s content. I spent over two hours exploring and trying things and I just scratched the surface. In doing so, I dialed up everything I could find to its most inefficient, CPU-spinning setting and the little Pi3 refused to bog down. That’s when I realized the threshold of “real computer” had been crossed. There’s a little panel applet called “CPU Frequency Monitor” that tells you your Pi3’s CPU clock speed. It also lets you set it to “Conservative”, “OnDemand”, “Performance”, or “PowerSave”. When “OnDemand” is selected, the Pi3’s quad-core 1.2 GHz ARM processor, normally hums along at 600 MHz. When you make the machine work hard it clocks up to its maximum 1.2 GHz. I had to really try to make this happen under normal use. Even when decoding a 1080p movie, the CPU would only clock up for a few moments in the beginning, then quickly settle back down to 600 MHz. Make no mistake, the Pi3 isn’t meant to edit 4K video or edit and/or encode any video for that matter, but aside from that, it’s a quite capable little desktop computer. Its ability to run MATE without breaking a sweat makes it a “real” desktop computer. If you’re stretched for cash and only have $200 to spend on a new desktop machine, you can make it happen at Amazon.com with this hardware:

Acer G226HQL 21.5-Inch Screen LED Monitor $90

Logitech Wireless Combo MK270 Keyboard and Mouse $21

CanaKit 5V 2.5A Raspberry Pi 3 Power Supply $10

Kingston Digital 32 GB Class 4 microSDHC $9

Rasberry Pi 3 Model B Mother board $40

Official Raspberry Pi 3 Case $12

Shipping $15

TOTAL $197

Of course, since the operating system and all the included apps are open-sourced, they won’t cost you a penny. However, I do urge you to donate to the various foundations involved, even if you can only afford a pittance. Specifically, I like The Raspberry Pi Foundation, Ubuntu.org and the Open Office Foundation who supplies the quite capable Libre Office Suite. Make it a buck apiece and your system will total an even two-hundred bucks. Now, who could complain about that?