Last Updated on January 15, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org
This YouTube video of Pinephone developer Martijn Braam inspired us some time ago to install LibreOffice on the Pinephone:
This took us almost a month working every day a little bit on it with the support of the Pine 64 community:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16614
We now have let go the Pinephone for the time being, and became interested in single board computers.
We now found a review of Spanish YouTube video maker biblioman09 which was done 6 month ago about the Orange Pi 5:
It reminds us of Martijn Braam’s video about desktop applications on the Pinephone. It shows the following desktop applications on the Orange Pi 5:
- Firefox
- Thunderbird
- Gimp
- Audacity
as well as others. With the Pinephone LibreOffice installation took us almost a month working every day a bit on it, and then we had it, but LibreOffice did not work well on the Pinephone screen, and we had no followers who participated in adapting LibreOffice for this device.
But how is it with the Orange Pi 5? Is there a support forum and an active community which can be compared to the Pine64 community? We do not know of such, and even if there would be one, we do not want to repeat the experience we made with the Pinephone with the Orange Pi 5.
And the situation is similar with the Raspberry Pi 5. Our thought where a while ago, if a Raspberry Pi 5 with Ubuntu would be there, could this not be our main everyday computer?
According to the videos of Martijn Braam, biblioman09, and also according to the new video about the Raspberry Pi 5, all three devices have to potential to be our main every day computer, since we do not need a lot of computer power.
But we are physiologists and not computer scientists and electronic engineers. And we already invested a lot of time in which device to choose for our projects.
After our evaluation we came to the conclusion that it is not worth to invest more time in other devices than the Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspberry Pi OS.
Leepspvideo has a series four Linux setup with 64bit KDE plasma which is built opon Raspberry Pi OS:
This image can be downloaded and flashed to the Raspberry Pi 4. This is sufficient for us personally. This is a sort of a desktop PC which is not very powerful, and we would not use it for surfing or mail applications to use it every day, because it is to slow. We have decided to use a thin client for these applications instead. But we choose for our projects with the sensors a Raspberry Pi 4 with Leepspvideo Linux setup with 64bit KDE plasma.
The Pinephone, the Orange Pi 5 and the Raspberry Pi 5 would be suitable for our projects as well and are more powerful than the Pi 4. But do YouTube videos about new devices not often raise expectations in these which which are difficult to achieve? For us personally we think it would be possible to choose these new devices as well, but we think it is too time consuming, and we let these new device be for the time being.