THE RASPBERRY PI, the little singleboard computer beloved of those for who ‘electronics project’ means more than replacing a lightbulb, is now on its fifth iteration. It’s come a long way in that time, replacing a text interface with a full Linux desktop and even being able to run Windows if you ask it really nicely.
The fifth release takes things up a level. While the Raspberry Pi 4 was usable as a desktop computer if you stuck to low-power versions of Linux and SATA SSDs connected over USB, the Pi 5 offers as much as three times the processing power of its immediate predecessor, and has a 1x PCIe 2.0 interface that, with the appropriate add-on, could be used to connect an NVMe SSD. With 8GB of RAM, the potential for overclocking, and an active cooler on offer too, this puts it very definitely in low-end desktop territory, with a Geekbench 6 single-core score akin to that of an Intel Pentium G4400T from 2015 and a multi-core score that tallies with the Pentium G4620 from 2017.
So, not huge amounts of processing power, but enough for a web browser, office suite, and potentially more depending on the OS you choose. The Raspberry Pi OS itself is a fork of Debian Linux 12.2 (Bookworm), and there’s a version of the latest Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur) release that’s tuned for the Pi. The ARM version of Windows 11 wasn’t out of reach for the Pi 4, so that could run well here if you can get hold of it, but it’s the free OSes that really shine on the Pi, with RiscOS and Android available, as well as operating environments tuned for retro gaming (such as RetroPie) and media center use (including Kodi).