Ode to a 1B

2025-02-21

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I have several Raspberry Pis, but the two I use most often are 1B models that I picked up in early 2014. Right now one is running DietPi with a few basic utilities and no desktop. It's on this board that I'm currently writing this very post.

The 1B is very slow by today's standards, with a 700 MHz CPU and only 512 MB of RAM. I ran DietPi's speed benchmarks on it, and it ranked at the very bottom. It does not feature Bluetooth or WiFi. It has an HDMI port, but it can also output RCA composite video--this is the mode I use, connected to a bona fide CRT television.

Sometimes I wonder if I really need any more than what the 1B offers.

In a perfect world, I wouldn't. I'd be able to get news and entertainment in plaintext formats, sent over lightweight protocols, easily parsed and processed by low-end machines. I could choose the encoding a resolution I wanted to see videos with, if I wanted to see them at all, and I could render EPUBs and other document formats with ease.

I increasingly feel that it's arbitrary exclusion that causes the 1B not to be viable as a daily-driver computer. Not lock-in by the Raspberry Pi Foundation--they've done a fantastic job providing continual support for a board that is now 13 years old. The problem is lock-out by other organizations. Hefty Internet browsers like Chrome lock content away behind Javascript, HTML5, DRM, and other processor-intensive tech. HEVC is great for storing large videos with small file sizes, but decoding it is impractical on almost all CPUs and GPUs more than a few years old. Many services are replacing HTML requests with API calls controlled by them. RSS is gone, killed by the AI-curated timeline. Several sites don't even offer information in a written format at all; it's all done by video.

It doesn't have to be this way. It only is because companies realized it would be more profitable, and they convinced the public to go along with it. But there are places in the virtual world where people are revolting. Gemini is one of those places.

I love using my 1B. An increasing part of me wants to swap out my laptop with it and use it for a week or two, just to see how viable it is. I have a command-lime Gemini client installed on it; maybe paired with enough Gemini services to get news and current events, it might actually be quite viable.

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[Last updated: 2025-02-21]