Raspbian

While working on another project, I set up my Raspberry Pi (revision B) with Raspbian. Although it was a bit time consuming, it was not difficult at all. Instead of using the default desktop environment (LXDE),  I decided to try out Raspian Mate as it’s a fork of the well-loved GNOME 2 desktop environment.

Raspbian

I was happy to see that GNOME 2 was still alive and well. I used to run Ubuntu on my home computers, but abandoned it when they switched over to GNOME 3 and Unity. The lack of features in GNOME 3, the clunky Unity interface and the poor device support in Ubuntu pushed me over the edge. I sold out to Macintosh and happily resigned myself to never having to look at xorg.conf ever again.

Raspberry Pi

It surprises me how far computers have come already in my lifetime. As a little girl, I remember playing with my grandfather’s Color Computer 2. It seemed remarkable at the time and I never expected computing to progress as rapidly as it has. For some perspective, the CoCo2 cost $240 in 1983 and had 16KB of RAM and an 8 bit processor at 1 MHz. Twenty years later, the Raspberry Pi costs $35 and has 512 MB of RAM and a 32 bit processor at 700 MHz. It will be interesting to see what the next twenty years brings.