You may have seen my post yesterday about my new Pi4 (@scalextrix/my-new-raspberry-pi-4b-8gb), however this great little device was missing a desktop environment as I don't really use it much, preferring to SSH. However after some discussions it seemed like a good experiment.

As a reminder we have the new Pi4 with an SSD:

Though bear in mind the SSD isn't doing much right now, it has some symlinks but I didn't move the /home folder there yet.

I chose lubuntu-desktop, Im not one of these people who gets passionate about which one to use.

In terms of trialing the environment, Im not getting too scientific here, not doing benchmarks or rigorous testing, just doing some basic tasks to see what happens.

In the picture we have 3 Firefox tabs open, one on a webpage and two simultaneously playing Youtube videos, we have an Openoffice Calc sheet open, and a split terminal window, one compiling Gridcoin (single thread) and the other displaying top.

Verdict

You certainly can get a lot of stuff on this desktop in parallel, and its reasonably quick after initially opening the application. Bear in mind at the moment new apps are loading from the SD card, but once they are in RAM, they are really decently quick. For example closing Firefox and reopening it is smooth, all the terminal operations are really sleek and there is little in the way of delays.

I think you could use this as a half decent daily driver, if you have a screen and keyboard where you are going, I reckon you could use this almost as a super portable computer, especially in the case I chose with its passive cooling and robust construction.