I’m several months in with using the tiny Raspberry Pi 5 to accomplish essentially all of my computing tasks, and I have no plans of giving it up. The $60 single-board computer slots perfectly into a tech-conscious, digital minimalist lifestyle.

I recently built myself a standing desk to replace the cheap $30 IKEA table I had been using as a desk for the past six or seven years. This spurred a wholesale cleaning and reorganization of my home office. As I was unplugging the cords to my Windows desktop PC to move everything out of the way and swap out my desk, I thought about just not setting it back up again. When we moved into this house a little over a year ago, I was so busy with renovation projects and getting settled that I didn’t unpack my desktop for about six or seven weeks, and instead did everything on my Chromebook.

Clearly the Pi doesn’t take up much desk space, and in my case it freed a bunch of under-desk leg room by substituting out for my full desktop tower.

I’ve tried using a Raspberry Pi as a desktop daily driver twice in the past. The first attempt was with a previous model, the Pi 4B, which lasted about five days. It felt just a bit too slow, and at that time in my life I didn’t have a ton of free time to figure out how to do everything I needed in Linux. The second attempt was with the Pi 5 about eight months ago when I received one after the product’s launch. Still I found it just a bit slower than I’d like, especially when launching applications.

This go around, the killer feature that boosted the Pi 5’s responsiveness to an acceptable level for me was adding an NVMe SSD. Read/write speeds were about 20x faster than using a microSD card, and application launch times were significantly and noticeably reduced. I am using a GeekWorm X1001 M.2 HAT for the Pi 5, and a Crucial PCIe Gen3 NVMe SSD — though only PCIe Gen2 is fully supported on the Pi 5 at this time, it is still plenty fast.

The Pi 5 is also a power efficiency champ, idling around 3.8 Watts and averaging 5 Watts during my typical usage. My Windows desktop (with a 4th gen i7 and a GTX 1070) idled around 40 Watts and averaged about 80 Watts during typical use. For those interested in min/maxing, the Pi presents a compelling case for itself. Running a computer for the same power draw as a typical overhead LED lightbulb is quite the achievement.

Here’s an incomplete list of computing tasks I have successfully (and smoothly!) used the Raspberry Pi 5 for:

• Web browsing/email
• Writing in Obsidian, my favorite Markdown text editor
• Managing my book library in Calibre, including syncing to my Kobo eReader
• Editing images in GIMP
• Using PrusaSlicer to process a model to print on my 3D printer
• Mounting my Google Drive account to be visible to the local file system, and setting up two-way file sync using rclone
• Adding content to my websites
• Password management via KeePassXC
• Printing to my Brother laser printer via CUPS
• Following along with online guitar lessons hosted on YouTube (1080p60 playback is about the Pi’s limit, and may require popping out the video into its own window to prevent frame drops)

That’s essentially everything that I was using my Windows desktop for, so I can truthfully say that I’ve replicated my entire workflow for my personal computer on the Pi 5. I do have a Windows laptop provided by my employer that I am required to do my work tasks on, so I don’t have to worry about things like getting Microsoft Teams running on the Pi (although many people have done so).

Due to this success with using the Pi 5 as my main PC, I’ve packed up my Windows desktop and put it in the closet. There it will stay, until (and if) I have to do something that absolutely requires Windows. So far, I’ve only pulled it out once, for a more involved 3D model that I knew I could breeze through in Fusion 360. FreeCAD on the Pi is certainly usable and I’ve made some basic things in there, but I haven’t spent enough time to become as proficient with it.

4GB vs 8GB of RAM for the Pi 5

In general, the world of PC enthusiasts is filled with people who recommend to buy more and better specs whenever possible, for future-proofing if nothing else. The best GPU one can afford, the fastest CPU, and of course more RAM. I used to be in that camp too, back when I was building gaming PCs. The nature of my Raspberry Pi 5 daily driver experiment obviously runs contrary to the internet’s established advice, instead calling into question what is enough.

The general consensus on the official Raspberry Pi forum is that 8 GB of RAM is the only way to go for most Pi purchases, and especially a desktop replacement. One user claims:

Even web browsing with Chromium is enough to fill the 4GB RAM (and have crashes).

Let’s test that claim.

Amazon’s homepage uses 126 MB of RAM. Gmail’s web client uses 200 MB. YouTube playing a 1080p video consumes about 450 MB of RAM. Text-dense webpages like blogs, forum threads, and Wikipedia articles typically use under 100 MB. One can answer for themselves whether their typical use case involves having two dozen typical web pages, and several YouTube videos, all open at once and not unloading any of them from RAM, because that’s about what it would take to start getting into swap space, let alone crashing a web browser. Personally, I am not a compulsive web browser tab hoarder, and don’t really consider that a reasonable behavior.

For fun and testing I tried to overload my Pi 5 4GB by multitasking everything I might possibly do at once. I opened Chromium with a Google Earth tab zoomed into a detailed area, a 1080p Youtube video playing, and a few typical webpages. I additionally launched Obsidian (editing this post), KeePassXC, Calibre with a book open, multiple file manager windows, PrusaSlicer with a .stl model loaded, and GIMP with an image loaded and ready to edit. Checking my RAM usage in Task Manager: 2777 MB of 4041 MB used. I still had over 30% of my RAM free.

In this case the GPU appeared to be the bottleneck, as it would reach 100% when rapidly switching between the Google Earth and YouTube tabs. My Pi reached 64C during this test and the active cooler fan held it steady there.

My conclusion is that 4GB of RAM is more than enough for the majority of people using a Raspberry Pi 5 as a desktop replacement for general computing and productivity tasks, even when multitasking. 8GB of RAM is unnecessary other than in very specific edge cases. Raspberry Pi OS (and Linux in general) is far more efficient with memory than Windows.

Final thoughts and future plans

I figured this would be an interesting piece to write, mostly because when one searches the web for information about using a Raspberry Pi as their main computer the top results are articles where a tech journalist used it for one or two weeks as a challenge, then gave it up. Another top result? A thread that I started on the official Raspberry Pi forum, which received 500 replies, maybe a half dozen of which were value-added. The rest of the posts were off-topic, baseless conjecture, or typical internet arguments. Like most things on the web these days, that thread is a waste of time to read.

I think for what most people use computers for, the Pi 5 with an NVMe SSD is a viable desktop replacement, if one is up to the task of learning Linux.

So allow me to pose the counterpoint to the common conclusion of this experiment; I’ve been loving using the Raspberry Pi as my main computer, and I have every intention of continuing to do so. I don’t care if it can’t play modern games or stream Netflix in 4k. In fact, I enjoy it partially because it can’t do those things.

The Pi’s little ARM processor doesn’t have the computing power to do everything, yet it has enough to do all the basic things that most people need, and in that way it’s refreshing. It’s “just enough” computer; its limitations a self-imposed constant reminder that these machines should primarily be tools rather than entertainment devices.