using raspberry pi as a normal computer

[asifnaz]

I am lookin to buy a raspberry pi and connect to HD TV via HDMI port . how is the idea ? and os suggestions please

[kedaha]

I have raspberry pi II.
As for the OS, I obviously use Debian, not Raspbian.
I used the updated jessie-rpi2-20150705.img.gz at debian-jessie-on-rpi2
I transferred the root file system to an external memory stick and use the ssd card just to boot the system.
It'd be interesting to hear comments from users who use Debian rather than Raspbian to use it as a "normal computer" since I use mine for testing purposes as a headless LAMP server.

[marcetm]

Hi,

I've got a Raspberry pi II with Raspbian. It's not my usual Pc so I can't tell a lot about it,obviuosly it's not an i7 but it does the job. My newphew enjoys playing with it, but I can't tell nothing more. I'm interested in knowing something more about people's experences.

[pylkko]

You guys state interest in hearing other's experiences. In that case I suggest going to raspberry pi forums. It probably easily has 100 times the user here.

I can comment a bit on using this computer with Debian though. Thing is, RPi has been gaining more and more mainline support. IIRC 4.4 still needed like 350 unique patches while 4.9 needs like 100. They are aiming at main lining it entirely so that in the near future you should be able to boot any Linux kernel (Debian's) with no additional mucking around

This does not hold for the armv6 models of course, since I don't think that any distribution offers that arch

[marcetm]

You're right about what I stated, but what I really meant is that I'm interested in knowing something more about people's experiences with Debian as @kedaha.

They are aiming at main lining it entirely so that in the near future you should be able to boot any Linux kernel (Debian's) with no additional mucking around

Thanks for your information pylkko.

[horgh]

I used a Pi 2 as my main PC for a while (months!). It's doable but it was frustratingly slow sometimes, mainly the browsing experience I was unhappy with. I used firefox. I ended up using youtube-dl to watch YouTube videos. I used Raspbian so I can't comment on Debian in particular with it.

[pylkko]

You're right about what I stated, but what I really meant is that I'm interested in knowing something more about people's experiences with Debian as @kedaha.

There is little difference. Raspbian uses Debian as a base and adds their own software in order to get some additional things to work. I would think that a user would get the best support and user experience using Raspbian as 99% of the user base use that. And the developers actively and rapidly make fixes and changes when users start to complain.

Kedaha is using a build by Sjoerd Simons, which slaps the RPi foudantions paches on a Debian kernel. In some sense it is "Debian". But running a Raspbian kernel... Therefore, one could say that it is exactly like Raspbian, except for two things 1) some hardware specific to RPi might not work and 2) it is ARMv7 optimize code. Raspbian does not use ARMv7 code because they want the OS to be backward compatible and work with all their products, even the older ones that don't have ARMv7 cores. What do you loose here? I don't know, but nothing so significant that you could readily notice it (I have personally tried Sjoerd's build and compared with Raspbian). However, not using Raspbian you cannot get the foundation's own Chromium straight from the repo (maybe you can download it somewhere) optimized for the platform, and I am fairly sure that any other browser will be worse and you shouldn't use it.