Raspberry Pi 5

Raspberry Pi 5, cased and with a MiniHDMI-HDMI adapter

I've had Raspberry Pi 5 for almost a year (thanks Marq), but barely tried it in all that time. Ought to have, it's become quite powerful. The desktop is not a joke and the repository is brimming with Linux go-to software such as GIMP, Audacity, Ardour, Kdenlive, Libre Cad... Much of these will run nicely if the expectations are not super-high and there's not too much going on at the same time. I shudder to think of doing video editing on it, though.

First things first. Multipaint and Marq's PETSCII editor run well on it. This was hardly a problem in 4 or 400 either, but the added speed is helpful especially for Multipaint.

Raspberry Pi 5 has been claimed to be about 2-3 times faster than Pi 4 or 400, and I'm not going to do any personal tests to find out.

The SD card setup is what is slightly worrying in the long run. It might be the bottleneck for why the upgrade/update cycle often takes long.

As for the size, it's basically the same Raspberry Pi form factor, no big compromises that I know of.

This Pi 5 came with a suitable Raspberry PSU, mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter and importantly, a small case with an active cooling fan.

Network and four USB ports

While I am not super appreciative of the colors and the shape of the box, it is extremely compact, practical and can be potentially attached to a surface.

It is likely better than the integrated keyboard version after all. I had some reservations about the Raspberry 400 with its large number of inconvenient cables. There are cables now too, but they work better on a separate box.

I could power a small Jonsbo display from the USB, the PSU appears to pack enough punch for something like this. This is positive because it means only one wall-wart PSU in the overall setup. The Jonsbo resolution for the desktop is decent, enough for the aforementioned PETSCII/Multipaint.

As the default alignment of the Jonsbo is vertical, the desktop needs to be rotated. This is a normal option, but buried deep into the setup menus. As there's another HDMI port, Raspi 5 should be good with multiple displays too.

It's still hard to defend this against a small laptop, when competing with size. Sure, the box itself is small but carrying keyboard, mouse and display around it can become troublesome.

The cover is easy to remove for GPIO pin access, wires could stick out too

It boots quite rapidly to the Raspberry Pi OS desktop, roughly 20 seconds, and the plain desk operations are fast. After moving the panel to the bottom of the screen where it belongs, and changing the locale language to English (I guess it picked up Finnish from the keyboard layout selection) it's starting to look like home.

As for emulators, I could obviously run Fuse Spectrum emulator from the repository, and Hatari is also available. UAE for Amiga is there, but as the repositories have stopped providing the launcher I'm not too keen to test it.

I'm also seeing there are "bare metal" Atari ST emulators that run on Raspberrys, but testing these may have to wait. If they cannot handle MIDI then I doubt I have much need for them, as I have the MiST FPGA and a real STE.

On a 2560 x 1440 screen

The "classic" Raspberry Pi perhaps peaked with Pi 3, the power requirements have increased since then and composite video generation is likely trickier as it requires adding pins and an actual connector. But then again having more desktop power is welcome, as I don't have many obscure needs for the Pi anyway. I'd hate to dedicate this for just one specific task, it's become too powerful and multi-purpose for that.

In as much as I don't use any heavy multimedia applications, the 8GB Raspberry Pi 5 could easily serve in many of the things I use a Linux for: Facebook doomscrolling, Google Drive, Blogger... well let's try again: retro coding, emulators, pixeling and writing.

Underside shows the microSD card.

I had observed some slowness working with Google Docs on the 400, but after some initial clunkiness I didn't find the actual writing a problem anymore. Browser-based environments can be expected to be slower than native compiled apps.

Browsing and Youtube appeared decent on the Raspberry Pi 5. Changing browser window size when running something like Drive or Youtube, will unsurprisingly result in choppy pauses and slowdown.

I left out Steam and any attempts at running more modern games, as I don't have time to play them anyway and I'm not keen to explore this angle just to see what works.

For extended periods of use, some other storage medium might be preferable than the SD Card.