Raspberry Pi 5 is really rather good

I didn’t order a brand new Raspberry Pi 5 when it was first announced. I think I managed to buy the earlier versions on release day, but for some reason this time I wasn’t that interested. However, I had a need for a fast Pi recently and so this week I finally got one.

It is really rather good.

When I got the Raspberry Pi 4 I was kind of expecting it to be a viable desktop alternative. After all, that is what some people were saying it was. It wasn’t. Browsing was slow and Visual Studio Code ran too slowly to be properly useful. But the Pi 5 is much more of a contender. Some of this might be down to the amount of memory available, my Pi 5 has 4G of ram which must help things along. I’m using it over VNC and I think I’d be happy enough to work there. Visual Studio Code seems to trundle along quite happily and web pages open instantly.

It is much more expensive than the original Pi. And of course you have to add the cost of the case, power-supply and micro-sd card to the total price. But for the money I reckon you get something pretty impressive and properly useful. And if you want to go back to the days of tiny, cheap Raspberry Pi’s you just have get yourself a Pi Zero.