My Raspberry Pi experience (using Model 3B)

[fox]

I'm posting this from Raspbian installed on my Rpi 3 using BerryBoot and booting from my usb stick. This is much faster than Ubuntu Mate 16.04, and quite usable. Everything responds faster. Menus appear faster, moving in files and folders, application startup, window closures and all window manipulations. Great to see this! But I'm curious whether this is due to Raspbian itself, or whether other distros available for the Pi have been similarly optimised. I might try the current version of Ubuntu Mate to see if it's better.

One interesting thing on the software side - Chromium is installed but Firefox isn't. And Firefox isn't even in the Raspbian repository.

[buster]

"One interesting thing on the software side - Chromium is installed but Firefox isn't. And Firefox isn't even in the Raspbian repository."

Maybe the software delivered in the binaries are made especially to have a small footprint, and be quick, and that would include updates to the software as well. Manpower can't be infinite. One is easier to maintain than two. Does the Chromium appear to be as full fledged as the ones you download in a Linux distro like say Kubuntu? Just a theory.

[fox]

Turns out that Firefox (ESR) is in the repository, but add/remove software app didn't see it. Once I added Synaptic, Firefox was there. I just installed it, and it's fine, though Chromium does appear to be faster.

In further testing, Raspbian does very poorly in the video department. It stutters badly and stalls with youtube videos, and won't play any downloaded videos that I tried that reside on my usb stick. Going back to Ubuntu Mate 16.04, it does only slightly better with the videos. I don't understand why this is because LibreElectric 8.0(with Kodi (17) has no trouble playing those videos, and they don't even stutter. Could it be settings? Missing drivers? RAM use?

I'm downloading Xubuntu 18.04 and LibreElectric 9.0.2 to see how they fare.

[ssfc72]

Try also installing VLC.

[fox]

VLC was already installed in Raspbian; it couldn't run a video from there. I just installed Xubuntu. The BerryBoot image was pretty barebones; didn't even have a browser. I had to enable a repository and then install Synaptic, Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird and VLC. Even LibreOffice was missing, but I can install that as well. Youtube videos work in the browsers but are choppy. VLC played the movie I tried, but it was choppy. It seems like LIbreElectric/Kodi is the answer for video playback on an Rpi3.

[Jason]

Mike, I mentioned Chromium in the beginning as being the installed browser. And my experience trying out Firefox. And thought Firefox ESR is in the repository, I found it didn't work as well as Chromium. Clearly you didn't read my initial post  . Anyway, Firefox was very laggy scrolling and loading pages and at times it just seemed to freeze for seconds at a time. Very annoying.

Buster, Chromium is the open source browser that Chrome is based around. It's a fully-loaded browser except that it doesn't include Flash which is becoming less of an issue as time goes on. But you can add Flash to it, and the version in Raspian already has a Flash plugin installed for it.

[Jason]

Mike: You didn't mention if you were still trying to view the video directly from the USB stick or after having transferred it. I didn't try playing a downloaded video. I'll do that next time I'm playing with my Pi.

[Jason]

I haven t done a great deal of usage, with my RPi, but i don t recall having any lagging like mike was having. I am going to get back to using the RPi with the latest OS and see how it works playing 1080P video on my hf tv and the quickness of a browser surfing the internet. I will be using the Opera browser.

Is Opera in the repositories for Raspian or another Pi OS? Because they don't see to have an ARM version on their website that I see and it's not open source so they'd have to make one specifically for the ARM processors.

[Jason]

Just tested a 1080 video file at 30 fps and it works perfectly playing it off the micro-SD card at full screen. Tried playing a 60 fps version of the same video but there must be something wrong with that file as it doesn't play at all.

[fox]

Try a YouTube video, Jason. Regarding your earlier question, the videos reside on my USB stick, but so does the distro. At any rate, the same videos play well from LibreElectric/Kodi. I’m now wondering if it’s a codec problem.

[buster]

When you lose track of time and spend too many hours with your teenie tiny Raspberry Pi, and then you turn off the wee little thing and walk into the next room, does it feel as if the world is filled with giants, and the furniture is huge???

[Jason]

Try a YouTube video, Jason. Regarding your earlier question, the videos reside on my USB stick, but so does the distro. At any rate, the same videos play well from LibreElectric/Kodi. I’m now wondering if it’s a codec problem.

I have. I mentioned this before. Maybe it wasn't clear that I was referring to videos on websites - I tested with YouTube:

You're limited in what you can do with it in terms of a desktop. It's fine for web browsing as long as you don't use Firefox which is a pig on it. You can watch videos full-screen at 1080p but there does appear to be some frame dropping going on when that's happening.

I don't think it's a codec issue unless they were different videos you tested. As I mentioned above, I can play full-screen 1080p@30 fps fine. I'm not sure if I have any 60 fps videos to test it with. How hot does your processor get? I'm wondering if the particulars of your case are causing it to get too hot and the processor is throttling down. But then, I seem to recall you had a heat sink or two.

[Jason]

When you lose track of time and spend too many hours with your teenie tiny Raspberry Pi, and then you turn off the wee little thing and walk into the next room, does it feel as if the world is filled with giants, and the furniture is huge???

You never fail to amuse, Harry! I haven't had that experience yet but it is kind of cool that it's small enough that when it occasionally gives me a the temperature warning, I just put it front of my table fan.

[ssfc72]

Oops! You are right, the Opera browser is not available for the RPi. :-(    I must have been just using the default browser of whatever RPi OS, that I had installed.
I normally always install Opera in an OS that I am running, so I just assumed that I had Opera installed. Wrong! :-)
Apparently the Vivaldi browser (which is similar to Opera)  is available for the RPi.

I haven t done a great deal of usage, with my RPi, but i don t recall having any lagging like mike was having. I am going to get back to using the RPi with the latest OS and see how it works playing 1080P video on my hf tv and the quickness of a browser surfing the internet. I will be using the Opera browser.

Is Opera in the repositories for Raspian or another Pi OS? Because they don't see to have an ARM version on their website that I see and it's not open source so they'd have to make one specifically for the ARM processors.

[fox]

When you lose track of time and spend too many hours with your teenie tiny Raspberry Pi, and then you turn off the wee little thing and walk into the next room, does it feel as if the world is filled with giants, and the furniture is huge???

I like that, Harry! And it was definitely true of me yesterday (and might be today). I hadn't touched my Pi for at least a year. Now I'm in experimental mode. I didn't step outside of the house at all yesterday!

Today's experiments involve updating the Raspbian and Xubuntu distros and testing their ability to show videos, but this time with my fan hooked up to eliminate any throttling effects. I don't like the fan; it's noisy and runs constantly, but I'm sure there are programs to turn it off when not needed. I actually did the updates to Raspbian last night, but didn't get a chance to test it. I also updated Xubuntu (substantial update), but it froze when halfway done and won't fully boot, so I either have to reinstall it or get into it during the boot sequence and complete the update from the command line. (Close your ears, Harry.  I might also try another distro from the BerryBoot site. I'll be posting later.