Ottavio Caruso  wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> My current Thinkpad is dying and I was wondering if the Raspberry Pi 4-B
> 8GB would be a half-decent laptop replacement, obviously with the
> addition of a portable monitor (suggestions?) and an external drive.
>
> I can only stress "half decent"; I don't expect miracles.
>
> I would be running NetBSD [1], not Raspbian.
>
> I don't really do gaming or other CPU intensive tasks, but I do some
> word processing every now and again and I'd like to build my own
> packages from pkgsrc.
>

I think it's a reasonable gamble for a desktop. Laptop might have
packaging issues.

No direct experience with either a Pi4 or NetBSD, but lots of experience
using FreeBSD-stable and -current on Pi2/3. So long as I  go easy on
the graphics, even that feeble setup performs quite well. It'll choke
on even the lightest use of the Chromeium browser, but it's usable with
some patience under LXDE or XFCE4. An 8 GB pi4 should solve both issues
and I plan to try the experiment in the near future, initially with
RaspiOS and later with FreeBSD when the port is better-supported..

I'm using a Pi3 under Buster right now, and it's a tolerable experience,
chromium included. However, the Pi Foundation has likely tuned the OS/GUI
for the platform, I doubt a BSD would perform equally well, as it's apt
to eschew some of the closed-source goodies that Broadcom promotes.

HTH, please post any discoveries!

bob prohaska

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