My Raspberry Pi configuration

I've been trying to use a Raspberry Pi as small development machine for personal projects. The overall goal is to spend less time on the computer by creating a distraction free machine with limited capabilities.

I use a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 gigs or ram and an aluminium heatsink.

After a lot of testing I ended using Dietpi. The install experience is poor but compensated by the large amount of tweaks and software proposed. It's probably better to create your own user experience by installing and tweaking the window manager and file manager that suits you.

But what is amazing with Dietpi is how responsive it is considering it's running on a Raspberry Pi. I installed i3 window manager and thunar and almost everything launches instantly. Even an Electron app like Visual Studio Code is usable as there's no lag when typing (but startup and syntax color can be a bit slow).

I use the 32bit version as the 64bit has bugs.

Dietpi installation guide

This guide is mostly for my own use but feel free to use it.

Basic setup

• If you are on Wifi, edit the dietpi and dietpi-wifi files in the boot folder before inserting the sd card, as dietpi will trigger apt update and apt upgrade on launch.
• Use dietpi-config in the command line and activate the sound in the audio options and bluetooth (if needed) in the advanced options (note that activating bluetooth sometimes returns an error, but it's working).
• Configure the language, keyboard and locale.
• Using dietpi-software from the command line launches a menu with ready to use software install. The Optimized software contains the window managers, the additional software contains things like git, openssh, vim and other tools.
• If you want to use i3, install i3, i3lock, i3status and suckless-tools.
• By default dietpi launches in the terminal. To launch to the window manager, use dietpi-config, go to autostart options. You'll see a list, go Desktops and press Enter on LightDM Login Mask, then select the user (probably dietpi) and exit. The next time you'll reboot you will boot on LightDM and will be able to choose your window manager.

Other programs

• thunar as a file manager.
• chromium-browser for browsing
• Hardware acceleration following this tutorial
• blueman to manager bluetooth devices
• mps-youtube and youtube-dl to play youtube music in the terminal. The youtube-dl package is old, you have to update it using pip3: pip3 install --upgrade youtube-dl and use your own Youtube V3 Api Key. Set it inside mps-youtube with set api_key KEY.
• By default dietpi has no emoji support or foreign languages like Japanese, you might want to install fonts to support them.
• I use feh to randomize wallpapers (it's inside my i3 config file)

Chrome extensions

• Ublock original
• Noscript
• Ninja cookie
• 1PasswordX
• h264ify

i3 config file

My config file is available on github.