Raspberry Pi 4: what 130 Hacker News owners think

Recommends itOwned 4 yearsStill going

I use TP link Omada gear and its a been very good replacement to unifi. I use it both personally & manage a side gig venue’s network. I have lots of vlans & even run dante & ndi with no issues. Replaced a Unifi system it was so buggy. DHCP reserve IPs failed, spotty issues with artists phones & the mixer board to mix their in-ears etc. I’ve setup IPSec tunnel to AWS VPC even pretty easy. Using a pi4 for last 4 years on poe running their management docker container. So solid! I’d recommend the pi over buying their hardware device mamager, its way slower.

Likes itOwned 4 yearsStill going

Requirements do vary. And I've got no regrets about using a Pi 4 a router. It's sitting on the shelf next to me, and has been trouble-free for over four years now.

Likes itOwned 3.5 years

Been running nextcloud on a raspberry pi 4 on prem for a very small business <5 users for about 3-4 years ish. It’s faster than most clouds because it’s local. I’ve had very little trouble with it. Don’t tend to use much the features apart from files sync though.

Likes itOwned 3 years

Thermal underwear. Entering the 10th year of a 30 euro Helly Hansen long underpants that keeps me warm half the year. Raspberry Pi 4 that served as my daily driver for around three years. A couple of dumbbells that got me started with weight training, and kept me going during covid. Together with the basic equipment that I later bought, it saved me hundreds and hundreds of euros in gym memberships. Best purchase under 10 euros is a simple cube with blank memo notes, that I use for grocery shopping and all kinds of other to do lists.

Likes itOwned 3 years

I ran Ubuntu Mate on a Raspberry Pi 4 for over three years as my daily driver. Mostly programming, browsing (also Youtube) and image editing. I even did some light video editing on it. I ended up with Mate eventually, other options except Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS didn't work fast enough. P.S. Literally every desktop environment on Linux looks better than Windows, if you'd ask me.

Likes itOwned 2 yearsStill going

Been running HA and a couple other services on RPi 4 with old SSD and DietPi as the OS, behind tailscale for 2 years. It needs a restart maybe once in a blue moon, and it's back online in 1 min, that's it.

Likes itOwned 2 yearsStill going

I've been using a raspberry pi 4 for 2 years with no issues. You need a good, clean power source or you can have all kinds of issues. Having good ventilation won't hurt. You also need a good sdcard that can handle a large volume of writes.

Likes itOwned 2 yearsStill going

a) Cable ethernet b) SSD (via USB3.0 adapter on my RPI4) c) Ubuntu Server LTS 22.04. d) cheap UPS. Mine runs Yggdrasil network, HAproxy, Caddy server, a couple of webservers in containers, and a TMUX instance that I log into almost daily to write code (slow computer reveals bad code much better). Since I put it (and my router) on the UPS, in the last 2 years it has literally never gone offline other than a couple of times I rebooted it for firmware upgrades.

Likes itOwned 2 yearsStill going

I use DietPi, which includes WireGuard and other things like PiHole. I've had my RPi 4 running without issue for more than 2 years, and can get 200mbps up and down.

Likes itOwned 1 year

I use RPi 4 with a cheap SSD connected via USB-to-SATA connector as a tiny home server for a year already and it works without issues. I know that not all USB-to-SATA connectors are compatible with RPi – I got lucky with the first connector I tried (Unitek). Not sure if RPi 5 has a wider compatibility.

Likes itOwned 1 year

Sample size of 1, but I ran an RPi4 just fine on a USB thumb drive for about a year. Still upgraded to an SSD later because I wanted even more storage space (and SSD seemed to have better random IOPS than a thumb-drive), but I'd say go for it.

Likes itOwned 1 year

Do people really have such a neurotic aversion to the sight of cables that they'd rather struggle with workarounds to an always-inferior wifi than just using an ethernet cable? It seems unhealthy to get that stressed out over the sight of a 3cm wide cable. I've had an RPi4 running continually for close to a year and never had a single network connectivity issue between the RPi4 and my router, connected via a 30m cat5 cable in my 75m² condo.

Likes itOwned 1 year

I’m using A Raspberry Pi4 as a dedicated Timemachine backup server with an SSD via USB3. Works perfectly for a year or so.

Likes itOwned 0.5 years

I’ve been using Frigate for six months on a raspberry pi 4 with a Google Coral TPU. It’s connected to 2 network cameras streaming in 2mp each. Frigate standalone works super smooth with no hiccups at all. I am using object detection for people and have not yet had a false positive or false negative. Additionally, I record not only the events, but but also a 24/7 video. Frigate takes care of garbage collecting old assets. I have it hooked up to my Home Assistant running on the same raspberry pi. From there, I get notifications to my phone which include a live video, snapshot and video recording. The UX and configuration options are way better than any commercial end user product I have found. It’s been a literal lifesaver, also fun and easy to use. Would recommend 10 of 10. I have no affiliation with the maintainers.

Likes it

I used to use DD-WRT, and Tomato, and Shibby's mod of Tomato, and Advanced Tomato, and other stuff. Somewhere, I'm sure I still have a WRT54GS that I hacked ~20 years ago to accept SD cards. It was a fun time in using inexpensive hardware in unintended ways. At one point, and I don't remember exactly when, I just started using OpenWRT instead. It wasn't always the case, but it presents a very usable GUI straight away these days and it has a ton of flexibility for getting creative later. At home I run it on a Pi4 that I bought for the purpose. It keeps up with my 500/20Mbps DOCSIS internet very well indeed. I've used it with a USB NIC to get dedicated ports, and also with VLANs and a managed switch instead. I just download and flash the card, plug stuff in, and configure it. No real issues -- for years, now. (Wireless is provided by Mikrotik access points.) When something faster happens in my neighborhood (which may be very soon; I had a very brief chat with a dude whose fiber splicing trailer was parked across the street just yesterday), I'll probably want to move to something more capable. That could be in the form of faster Pi, or an old PC running OPNsense -- or even stick with OpenWRT. No big deal. If I really wanted a tidier package for light-weight travel or something, then I guess I'd pick something appropriate from glinet and put an official OpenWRT image on it. For heavier-travel, I've got a kit with a Pi4, a managed PoE switch, and a backup Mikrotik box (th…

Doesn’t like it

Thanks for this. Yeah, it has the follow me mode that sends temperature from the remote control every 3 minutes. I think it's a Senville from Home Depot. The remote control sensor only seems to read at 1 C resolution, so it seems like using the follow me mode with the stock remote is right out of the question. My biggest worry is the heat from the microcontroller affecting the temperature on the temperature sensor. I want to use a Sensirion SHT45, it has 0.01 degree temperature resolution and is supposed to be accurate to 0.1 C. But I need to locate the temp sensor far enough away from the microcontroller to make the overall remote controller form factor awkward. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 that does the temperature data logging and web server, but that runs pretty hot.

Doesn’t like it

I tried using it on my x86_64 desktop. Could not use it. Then I tried using it on a raspberry pi 4. Did not work. This is specifically for 64 bit arm. I see no reason why you could not enable desktops as well? Just a matter of compilation

Neutral

I’m using ZBT-2 with HAOS on RPi 4 4GB. It’s rock solid in a crowded apartment complex. Devices are 90% IKEA and 10% Aqara. Definitely try that antenna and don’t connect additional border routers. Let HA own everything.

Neutral

My Raspberry Pi 4 has been used to run both a Jitsi and Trackmania server over the years. I never considered using the SD card since it can boot and run from a USB 3 flash drive. Later on, I picked up an Argon One case to add a SATA SSD. Thankfully, modern Rockchip SBCs tend to come with NVMe slots.

Likes it

I used to get Sandisk cards but recently I stopped using SD cards altogether. When it came time to update from Debian 12 to 13 for my Pi4 I migrated to an NVME USB enclosure for my boot drive. Just yesterday I set up another Pi4 for a project with an M.2 SATA enclosure and in both cases they work just fine.

Neutral

I’ve got an rpi4 booting from an usb ssd and bought a n100 minipc anyway… last February for $150. Should have bought a 40ft container of these

Likes it

You can, I am self-hosting Immich via Docker on Raspberry Pi 4 with small SSD and it's nothing but good experience so far (but I keep the photos backed up elsewhere just in case, I use Immich mostly to share curated sets of photos)

Doesn’t like it

100% with you on the IO. I've never even wanted two display output ports with any raspberry pi. You know what I do want though? An actual damn HDMI port! HDMI cables are everywhere, wherever I am I have unlimited options to connect an HDMI device to some kind of screen. But micro HDMI? The literal only thing in my life that uses it is the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. There have been plenty of times where I've reached for a Pi 3b instead of a 4 or 5 just because I didn't have a micro HDMI cable. I do not understand what has gone through their head. How could anyone look at the use case for a Raspberry Pi and decide that two micro HDMI ports is a better choice than one HDMI port? I don't understand it. Like you, my experience with the Pi is that they mostly just sit there, headless, so the only reason I need display output is that it's useful during setup (because they don't have a proper serial console port). I can't set up a Pi 4 or 5 without going hunting for that micro HDMI cable I bought specifically for that purpose and never use for anything else. I can set up a Pi 3b anywhere, at any time.

Doesn’t like it

A related article I read yesterday lamented that 1GB of RAM isn't enough to run a graphical browser anymore (1). Sure JavaScript runs fast now, but at the cost of the code size of the average website being unnecessarily large. This is because speedy js and speedy network connectivity allows for more code, more network requests. Another example of Wirth's law. This was the case when I got a Rapberry Pi 4 with 1GB of RAM about late 2019. You could run one tab of Chrome, but any more and it would be killed. (1) https://log.schemescape.com/posts/hardware/farewell-to-a-net...

Doesn’t like it

I have a Pi4 running Raid 1 NAS with two SSD drives, and an externally powered USB hub. Unfortunately, it crashes every 6 months or so and needs a power cycle. Haven't been able to track down why, but I also suspect a power supply issue. Initially I naively tried to run the two drives right off the USB3 ports in the Pi, and that basically crashed within a day - but that is of course because I was exceeding the power draw. An external hub and supply helped, but didn't fully fix the issue.

Doesn’t like it

Plenty of manufacturers understand USB-C well enough to get this right. Out of what must be dozens, I own a total of two devices, and have encountered one more, that have this kind of mistake in their design; except for the Raspberry Pi 4, I’m not surprised based on the quality and price of the device.

Doesn’t like it

I ended up building my own image of OpenWRT to make the package hell better on upgrade, and as a bonus, I was able to build in my configs too. Recovering from a failed Pi was as simple as flashing the most-recently-built image. Upgrading just required rebuilding the image (and resolving whatever went wrong, of course, though it was usually pretty light). As a bonus, it's easy to swap SD cards on the Pi so I can have the last "known good" config available while taking the update. Now I run OpenWRT on one of those x86 mini PC boxes with 4x 2.5GBe Intel NICs because my wirespeed is 2 Gbps symmetric, so I needed just a bit more oomph than the Pi could provide. The hardware is somehow even _less_ reliable than a Pi 4 - I'm already on my third machine in 3 years. I would love to find something more reliable.

Doesn’t like it

This is actually probably the best thing OpenWRT have done in quite a while. I got two (one for a backup) and I've been super happy. I've happily used TP-Link, GL.iNet, and Raspberry Pi 4 devices, with OpenWRT in the past, but nothing beats the "it just works" aspect of a first party device designed for this, fully open, and a reasonable price. Most off-the-shelf devices have too slow of CPU for a low latency/buffer router. The Raspberry Pi 4 is easily fast enough but needs to use USB3 network adapters which require packages not in the default rpi4 OpenWRT image. Not insurmountable, but a consistent pain every upgrade.

Doesn’t like it

Sometimes size matters, tho. I came into MiniPCs from a Raspberry Pi solution. Our Pi's had to display multiple videos onscreen and weren't fast enough (I think the standard at the time was RP4), so we switched the critical ones to MiniPCs but they had to be small & light enough to hang off the back of a VESA mount on a TV suspended above a gym floor.

Doesn’t like it

on the QEMU thing... the only time I tried to cross-build arm containers from an x86 server was using whatever servers Github Actions supports... the x86_64 build was pretty normal for the project, but the qemu/buildx/arm64 build was about the same speed as an 8mb Raspberry Pi 4 to build the same project... pretty disappointing.

Raspberry Pi 4

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