Using the Raspberry Pi as a daily driver

How capable is the Pi when it comes to carrying out day-to-day computing tasks? Michael Reed powers down his x86 desktop to find out...

- Michael Reed

We've decided to see how viable a Raspberry Pi 400 is as a Linux-based daily driver' machine and attempt to use it for day-to-day tasks in place of a standard desktop PC. The Pi 400 itself has similar specifications to a Raspberry Pi 4, but the whole thing is contained inside the keyboard unit. As part of the test, the bulk of this article was written on the Pi.

We'll start at the beginning, by looking at the device itself. Sat on a desk, the Pi looks like a white compact keyboard, but it's a tad heavier and fuller once you turn it over in your hands. Around the back, there are various connectors. From right to left these are: Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, two USB 3.0 sockets, USB C power, two micro HDMI sockets, a miniSD socket, and finally a 40-pin Raspberry Pi GPIO header. Under the hood the Pi 400 sports a quad-core ARM chip clocked at 1.8GHz and 4GB of RAM. Neither of these can be upgraded, and the RAM is shared between the CPU and GPU.

There are no analogue audio ins and outs, so we alternated between a USB audio adaptor (Lexicon Alpha) and some Bluetooth headphones. Both of these solutions worked flawlessly. The Pi 400 can also transmit audio through the HDMI connectors alongside the video data if you have a suitable display.

Connecting it all up

For our purposes, we connected the official mouse and the power supply. One of the HDMI sockets was connected to a standard 22-inch 1080p monitor. For networking, we used the integrated Wi-Fi instead of the hardware Ethernet socket. In operation, the unit emits no sound because it's passively cooled. Despite this, at no time when we were using it did we feel that it was in danger of overheating, and we did some things that kept the CPU cores pretty loaded up.