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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

In my mind this share one of the great drawbacks of the Raspberry Pi 400: The storage solution is terrible and makes the whole thing pointless.

It doesn't matter that much that the regular boards don't have storage beyond the SD card. It's fine for fun little project. If you attach a keyboard, then I honestly expect this thing to be able to function as an entry-level desktop. It might just be me, but both the Raspberry Pi 400 and this Orange Pi 800 needs an M.2 slot. It doesn't need to support NVME, but at least add support for an M.2 SSD.

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With the latest firmware, the RPi 4 can boot from an SSD over USB. Still not as nice and convenient as an M.2 drive would be, but it's much nicer than using an SD card.

I have a 400 booting off a USB SSD (a SanDISK 1TB external drive). It works fine, and performance is quite decent (good enough performance of Emacs, TeX, and software builds to suit me).

The other is the ridiculously shitty micro-HDMI ports. Why did they cripple the 400 with this junk?

Micro-HDMI should never, never be used unless the device is so small that a regular HDMI is impossible to implement. Even then... you should probably just make the device bigger.

Ah yes... to explain: they require adapters, and these adapters are mechanically fragile - tugging the cable can break them. Ask me how I know...

The ports themselves are mechanically fragile. You're not just breaking an adapter; you're breaking the device itself.

Which why one should also not buy Canon's "cinema" cameras (R5 C) that are similarly crippled with micro-HDMI (but astronomically more expensive).

I thought of it - I can be happy that the adapter broke, maybe they are weak on purpose.

Other RK3399 systems support NVME devices. Using an eMMC card in the Raspberry Pi 400 should have been easy to do.

They do support NVMe, but only 4 lanes at PCIe 1.0 speeds. Seems like a waste to spend $$$ on storage that will only be partially used by a $$ board.

NVMe drives are surprisingly cheap these days - you can get a 128GB 2230 drive for $15 from several manufacturers. 256GB 2242 drives are around $30. If you have the space for a 2280 drive, you can get larger drives for under $100/TB.

128GB microSD cards are also around $15, but will likely have worse performance and durability than the SSD.

I could give the Pi 400 to my mother as an entry level desktop and she'd be completely fine. It's not like she needs 500GB of drive space.

Sure, but flash reliability is not great. SD cards can get hot or jostle, and eMMC can wear out and basically turn the board to ewaste (because replacement of the eMMC later in life of the device is difficult and often not worth it). Beyond that, speeds are much slower than pcie storage.

Except that the video will freeze sporadically when she tries watching The Staircase on HBO Max.

After you go to the trouble of figuring which Chromium startup flags will get a minimally watchable streaming experience, she will then complain that the mouse is broken. When you ask her, "What do you mean the mouse is broken? I didn't touch the mouse," she replies, "I mean it doesn't move when I move it."

Then you'll notice that one of your Chromium flags has mysteriously caused sporadic jank for the mouse pointer. And you'll try to explain that it's not broken, there's just some kind of unpredictable latency in the pointer motion.

She'll then reply, "Right, it's broken."

And you'll stand there, defeated, staring into the frozen eyes of Colin Firth for five straight seconds as you finally begin to comprehend that "entry level desktop" doesn't mean what you thought it did.

The Raspberry Pi OS is just not great. I worked with one lately through an education project and was disappointed by the DE and system defaults in a lot of cases.

It's definitely not representative of the best that Linux desktops have to offer now.

Very well put.

I think it’s the simplicity of it that is deceptive; the RPi and other alternatives work great in experienced hands. In particular when the user can detect any early sign of an issue or is good enough to quickly diagnose what’s going wrong, fix it in 5 min and forget about it, it looks like a cute trivial little cheap machine that just works fine.

It takes looking at a kid or less experienced users working through a task for 5~10 mon to realize how much the hardware/software has to be flexible and permissive to make the user successful.

> the RPi and other alternatives work great in experienced hands.

I haven't seen a single piece of evidence that anyone can get Chromium to smoothly stream video under Raspian Bullseye (or any other distro for that matter).

Can you elaborate? Is the problem with using a sd card is that the transfer speed is too slow? How bad is it?

If you are like me and can't be bothered with setting up a read-only FS for the system partition, in a year or two files on the card inevitably get corrupted to the point that the OS becomes unbootable. That's how frequently I swap/reflash SD card on my home RPi media-server. The speeds aren't great either.

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