Raspberry·desktop
Raspberry Pi 4
Based on 54 credible posts from Hacker News, Bluesky & the forum. 27 filtered out as bot-like or off-topic.
Medium confidenceA solid sample; expect small shifts as more owners post. How we score
Scored November 11, 2026
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Owner reviews
Overall owner mood
Most owners are happy with it: 67% of 54 reviews are positive and 22% negative. Praise centers on price & value and software & ai. The most common complaint is performance (8 owners). Owners are divided on build & durability. Owners with 6+ months of use feel about the same (71% positive).
What owners like
Price & value praised by 5 owners (2 disagree)
“I use LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi 4, though it doubtless also works well on a Pi 5 (and the cheapest one with 1 GB of RAM is probably plenty).”
Software & AI praised by 4 owners (2 disagree)
“It actually got better with bug fixes over the years.”
Sound praised by 2 owners
“My speakers gift was a Raspberry pi 4.”
Display praised by 2 owners (1 disagree)
“The fun part: I wired up a cheap TM1637 4-digit display to the GPIO pins.”
What owners complain about
Performance raised by 8 owners (2 disagree)
“Too slow to implement applications.”
Owners are split on
- Build & durability 4 like it · 3 don't
Worth reading the reviews on these if they matter to you.
What owners talk about
- Performance2 praise · 8 complain
- Build & durability4 praise · 3 complain
- Price & value5 praise · 2 complain
- Software & AI4 praise · 2 complain
- Display2 praise · 1 complain
- Sound2 praise · 0 complain
- Controls & input1 praise · 1 complain
Built from the reviews themselves — every quote links to the owner who wrote it.
Every credible owner review, most detailed first. Bots, off-topic comments, and ones that say nothing about using it are left out.
[...] Now it’s at the point “make a raspberry pi 4 case” and the agent searches, builds, verifies… What surprised me in this process is how little meaning AI benchmarks have. [...]
[...] It had about the same capability as the very expensive (and large) Win NT4 machine we used for our 80-person organization when I started my career in tech. I eventually replaced the Zero with a Raspberry Pi 4, primarily because the Zero’s IO ports are annoying (eg, USB is not hot-pluggable!) An RPi 4 is extreme overkill for personal email but it still idles under 1W and when it fails I can replace the entire machine for next to nothing. [...] They seem to last 4 years almost to the day. I suppose if I set up a RAMdisk they might last longer, but honestly, for the price of an SD card it’s not really worth my time.
[...] It can easily run on a Raspberry Pi 4 1 GB RAM. [...] It can compile and run many Rust/Python tests fine or build static sites. [...]
[...] Raspberry Pi 4 that served as my daily driver for around three years. [...]
My NAS is a Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB hub and WD Portable Hard drives plugged into the USB hub. [...] I am impressed by how reliable Raspberry Pi 4 and Ubuntu are.
[...] My speakers gift was a Raspberry pi 4. I've used it as a webhost and dev box until a couple of months ago when the SD card failed for the second time in 6 months. [...]
I have used Opus 5 and some Fable 5 to finally get realtime transcoding of 4K 10-bit HEVC (to 1080p or smaller SDR AVC) working on a Raspberry Pi 4. [...] the Argon HEVC hardware decoder outputs SAND30 which is a tiled format that is annoying to work with and not really supported by anything else, the big performance issue has been with converting and scaling it, but as it turned out a lot of it was really with just moving memory around, so by fusing multiple steps into a single kernel it became fast enough. [...]
[...] If I am really interested, i could download a 512GB retropie torrent/magnet and then copy it to a microsd card and run 70k games on a raspberry pi 4... [...]
My Raspberry Pi 4 has been used to run both a Jitsi and Trackmania server over the years. [...]
I used a Raspberry Pi 4 as a Steam Link for many years. It was only 1080p60 and had a touch of input delay, but it wasn't terrible. It actually got better with bug fixes over the years.
I use LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi 4, though it doubtless also works well on a Pi 5 (and the cheapest one with 1 GB of RAM is probably plenty). It does great with local [networked] media and that's all I use it for. [...] (LibreElec has a huge advantage to me that most people probably don't care about: My AV receiver sounds brilliant and was once very expensive [$4,500], but it's rather old and it chokes on HDMI signals higher than 1080i. [...] This would make the receiver a non-starter for post-Blu-Ray film soundtracks, except the Pi4 has two HDMI outputs. It is a no-effort built-in for LibreElec to use one of these outputs for video, while the other one is dedicated to high-res multichannel PCM audio. [...]
[...] Too slow to implement applications. So many examples of big balls of Python code creaking and struggling, slowly. Just one example: my homeassistant instalation running three lights overwhelmed a Raspberry PI 4 causing it to crash once a week. [...]
I don't personally know many people who've used it so I'm not sure if this was a me thing but here was my experience in short: I set up OpenClaw on a raspberry pi 4 that I could ssh into using my main computer. [...] I spent about 40-50 bucks in one week just working through kinks and having it fix itself until I stumbled onto a post that helped me optimize my model usage for price instead of just throwing Opus and Sonnet at everything. Even after making this adjustment, the morning debriefer worked maybe once or twice a week and broke every other morning, telling me that it fixed itself and it would never happen again. [...]
I have a homelab with 4x Raspberry Pi 4's running Kubernetes a GMKtec Intel i5-12450H and a ProLiant ML350p Gen8 (which uses an ungodly amount of power). I'd add the following software/tools which have been awesome: - Portainer running on GMKtec & ProLiant - Dozzle (docker log viewer) on GMKtec & ProLiant - Beszel (server monitoring, awesome) all hosts - Kubetail (Kubernetes log viewer on Pi K8s) - HomeAssistant - Jellyfin - UptimeKuma (uptime and notifications) - Semaphore UI (ansible playbook runner) - Metabase (querying and visualization for dbs)
Hi HN, I spent the weekend experimenting to see if I could get a proper LLM running locally on an old Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB), and more importantly, if I could get it to interact with the physical world. [...] Because they are genuinely 1-bit (trained from scratch at 1-bit, not quantized down to 4-bit), they actually fit. [...] I tried Gemma 4 E2B first, but it was just too slow on 4GB of RAM. The fun part: I wired up a cheap TM1637 4-digit display to the GPIO pins. Since Bonsai supports native tool calling, I wrote a small Python proxy that injects an updatedisplay function into requests. When the model decides to use the tool, the proxy catches the streaming call, extracts the text, and drives the display. [...] It’s definitely just a weekend project (7-segment displays can't render W or M, self-signed certs, etc.). [...] Would love to hear your thoughts or see if anyone else is building edge AI hardware projects!
[...] So around 2004 I bought a WRT54GS (for the extra RAM and flash) and immediately put OpenWRT on it. [...] ye olde Linksys box now has an SD card slot for some crazy-expensive local storage!). [...] And I was happy with that kind of thing at home, with old Linksys or Asus boxes doing routing+wifi or sometimes acting as extra access points... until the grade of cheap routers I was playing with started getting relatively slower (because my internet was getting relatively faster) and newer ones were becoming less-hackable (thanks, binary blob wifi drivers). [...] Part of the roadmap involved divorcing the routing from the wifi completely -- to treat the steering of packets and the wireless transmission of data as two completely distinct problems. I used a cheap Raspberry Pi 4 kit to get this done. [...]
At home, I put all of my network infrastructure software in one basket because that seems like the right path towards maximizing availability[1]: It provides one point of potential hardware failure instead of many. [...] That box currently happens to be a Raspberry Pi 4 that uses VLANs as Ethernet port expanders, but it is also stable AF with a [shock! [...]
[...] I've never even wanted two display output ports with any raspberry pi. [...] HDMI cables are everywhere, wherever I am I have unlimited options to connect an HDMI device to some kind of screen. [...] The literal only thing in my life that uses it is the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. [...] 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 built Aegis-DB — a database that handles SQL, key-value, document, time series, graph, and event streaming in a single Rust binary. It's been running in production on 50+ Raspberry Pi edge controllers across commercial buildings for months. The real story: I built an entire building automation ecosystem from scratch. [...] The edge controllers are 50+ Raspberry Pi 4/5s running my custom NexusEdge software — Rust hardware daemons for I2C, BACnet, and Modbus communications, direct HVAC equipment control via analog outputs, 24V triacs, 0-10V inputs, 10K/1K thermistor inputs, and dry contact inputs. [...] OTA rolling updates push new versions across the fleet without downtime. [...] My laptop runs it for development. [...]
[...] Also cool: I enjoy running clocks on this 5" inch circular touch screen IPS display from Waveshare: The content is provided by a Raspberry Pi 4, and these Javascript/CSS/SVG clocks can be quite taxing. Especially a smooth running seconds hand often causes visual stuttering. [...] If anyone knows of other large circular displays, please post here. The new BMW Mini has a gorgeous 24cm circular OLED display, but that's not generally available, OEM only [1][2]. [...]
I just bought a Raspberry Pi 4 1 GB memory with aluminum case, aluminum NVME adapter, and a 64 GB SSD for about 80 euros. With microsd it’s even cheaper. [...] After the price increase, this period will only shorten! [...]
[...] From a hardware point of view, it’s a nice board and when I properly compiled some softwares myself I actually got really interesting performance, but it was a pain in the ass. So I ended up buying a Raspberry Pi 4, much better supported and documented.
[...] Also attached: a Raspberry Pi 4 with an external 8TB HD. [...] Something very deliberate about going to a place to pay a price to go into a specific space to do a specific thing. Pandering to second screen audiences has produced some of the most profoundly insulting media in living memory.
[...] I used a Raspberry Pi 4 and later a 5, I used Canakits which provided approved power supplies for both, I used the highest-end SD cards I could get and then later used a special case/hat to instead use an NVME stick for storage. [...]
[...] So it works without a fan, but not without a heatsink The Raspberry Pi 4 will throttle performance at 80C (if I recall correctly) but it can work without a heatsink. [...] I bet the keyboards have a heatsink for the Pis built in You are right, both models use a heatsink. [...]
[...] The BT Speak is a poor ematation that runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 and is sluggish because Linux accessibility is hard and not optomized for such low-power devices. [...] I got Speechd-el talking on Termux for Android last night though, although it was rather laggy between key press and speech. Emacspeak development has paused, though, and Speechd-el seemingly hasn't been updated in half a year. Emacs itself has a lot going on for a normal screen reader to interpret which is why Emacs-specific speech interfaces are so useful. A few examples: On Windows, with Windows Terminal and NVDA screen reader, arrow keys read where the cursor is, but C-n and C-p, C-f and C-b, all that, NVDA doesn't say anything. [...] Programs like the calendar, though, really doesn't speak well with a screen reader. [...]
[...] Anybody using ZFS or ZFS-like to do some trivial standard RAID setup (unless they are used to and comfortable with ZFS, which is an entirely different story) is just begging to lose data. [...] I built my main NAS box's ZRAID with the drives in USB-3 caddies on a Raspberry Pi 4. [...]
[...] 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. [...]
I got a Raspberry Pi 4 with an Atari Pi case set for the holidays. (I needed an upgrade since the last one I bought was the first model sold.) I spent today loading Retropie & my retro games collection onto it. [...]
I tried running frigate on a raspberry pi 4 with coral, but it was very slow. [...] Then I bought a minipc, nothing special, and that works great. [...]
I run Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 4. [...] So even though I keep Kodi around, most of my video-watching is with Plex, wherein: The library updates itself. [...] Plex is very set-and-forget, and its performance is great on a $20 ONN streamer-box from Wal-Mart (and there's also smart TV apps and PC-oriented playback, of course). [...]
Just looked up the price I paid for a 512GB micro SD card I bought 2 years ago because I wanted to get another for a Raspberry Pi 4 I had a long time in my drawer. I could sell it and make double the profit, I mean both. It's depressing.
Three month later and the replacement Raspberry Pi 4 has faulty hardware and is about to die😒 That vinyl record was cursed. (maybe I should tell you which record it was, because if you own it: burn it - before it can do harm, just my advice)
[...] Then I tried using it on a raspberry pi 4. [...]
If i'm reading this correctly, can run Immich from a Raspberry Pi 4? [...]
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)
Which is still slightly useful - I've got two Dell Wyze 5070, fanless, and being able to load them with 16 GB of ddr3 ram each for a song meant they were basically an obvious upgrade from being so cramped for RAM running a Raspberry Pi 4.
I will be replacing the Raspberry Pi 4 I use as a home server with a more powerful HP desktop. I am getting tired of DDOSing myself whenever I open the wrong menu on Nextcloud.
This month I will start creating tutorials for uxwizz.com (I got a Raspberry Pi 4, and I will write a blog post on how to set-up LAMP stack and run your own UXWizz dashboard locally on a PI)
[...] Even a raspberry pi 4 or newer has dual 4k outputs, that can fill the entire screen at native resolution. [...]
[...] I use a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu and Samba as my NAS. It is cheap and reliable.
[...] In my own little world at home, I just use OpenWRT (on a now-old Raspberry Pi 4), Mikrotik access points, and with some random switches that grok 802.11q wherever they are useful. [...] But all of that is drifting pretty far from the concept I'd like to see, which is: Person walks into Wal-Mart. Person buys a router, and some Matter wifi light bulbs. [...]
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.
[...] no apps or wifi.From 2003. [...] If you're looking for an upgrade, try to find a Panasonic Viera VT/ST/GT50 or 60, but check for burn-in before you buy. I plug my laptop via HDMI and the possibilities are still there. If the TV has HDMI CEC, then get yourself a RaspberryPi 4 (lowest memory model is enough) and LibreELEC. [...]
I have been using this setup with a raspberry Pi 4 and the Pi High Quality camera. It works really well but it's not 4K though. I'm working on replacing the base with something bigger shop.pimoroni.com/products/mic...
Ladies, I bought a raspberry pi 4 and set it up in <1 hour. this thing's like way too much computer for just a pi hole install, i'm gonna figure out how to drop a NAS on it i think
Palm pilot keyboard at goodwill discovered for $3.50 hacked into a USB compatible hid with a rp2040 hardwired into a very slimmed down raspberry pi 4 and today I got the battery and charge circuitry figured out. Build your own laptop, all the cool kids are doing it.
Also gonna set up one of the raspberry pi 4's to be an SSH box for terminus with Claude Code installed so I can just hack on shit from my phone because why not man fuck it lets go bowling
[...] ...which I tried doing, a week or so ago, for a minor point release update within the 25.12.x series. [...] My router has a huge advantage here in that it's a Raspberry Pi 4, so it's easy to remove/replace/re-do the flash device and start over. [...]
[...] I have a Raspberry Pi 4 that does the temperature data logging and web server, but that runs pretty hot.
The claims, and the evidence
What the brand claims
No published claims on file for this product yet.
What owners report
“[...] Now it’s at the point “make a raspberry pi 4 case” and the agent searches, builds, verifies… What surprised me in this process is how little meaning AI benchmarks have. [...]”
after 18 monthsView on Hacker News“[...] It had about the same capability as the very expensive (and large) Win NT4 machine we used for our 80-person organization when I started my career in tech. I eventually replaced the Zero with a Raspberry Pi 4, primarily because the Zero’s IO ports are annoying (eg, USB is not hot-pluggable!) An RPi 4 is extreme overkill for personal email but it still idles under 1W and when it fails I can replace the entire machine for next to nothing. [...] They seem to last 4 years almost to the day. I suppose if I set up a RAMdisk they might last longer, but honestly, for the price of an SD card it’s not really worth my time.”
after 10 yearsView on Hacker News“[...] I've never even wanted two display output ports with any raspberry pi. [...] HDMI cables are everywhere, wherever I am I have unlimited options to connect an HDMI device to some kind of screen. [...] The literal only thing in my life that uses it is the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. [...] 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. [...]”
“[...] If I am really interested, i could download a 512GB retropie torrent/magnet and then copy it to a microsd card and run 70k games on a raspberry pi 4... [...]”
Common Raspberry Pi 4 problems
Problems most owners who mention them agree on, plus ones owners are split on.
- Performance8 owners report this (2 disagree)View on Hacker News
“The BT Speak is a poor ematation that runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 and is sluggish because Linux accessibility is hard and not optomized for such low-power devices.”
- Build & durabilityOwners split: 3 complain, 4 happyView on Hacker News
“Even after making this adjustment, the morning debriefer worked maybe once or twice a week and broke every other morning, telling me that it fixed itself and it would never happen again.”