Christmas Day 2025 - Received Rasberry Pi 500+ As A Gift!

Good day, all!

My family opened Christmas presents last night at 12 AM (most of us didn't want to wake up early to open presents).

I received a Rasberry Pi 500+ for Christmas - it was a gift from my daughter.

What spurred this interest?  I mean, I was never really curious about Rasberry Pi devices, as I've always had very robust computer systems in my household.  Only now am I hating all the systems sprawled about within my basement.  

My son received a Rasberry Pi 5 from my daughter in November and I got to see it (I'd never held or seen them prior to that).  He was able to configure it as a media server pretty much immediately after he got it.  I loved the small form factor, which spurred my interest.

Once I saw his, I went to Rasberry Pi to see the things they had.  I was immediately curious about the 500+ and had planned to get it on my own, but as my family uses Elfster.com to gift each other, I added it to my wish list.

The keyboard is NICE!  I love how it soft-clicks (it's a mechanical keyboard)...I've a Royal Kludge S98 and that thing is noisy AF compared to this.  I also love the 500+'s RGB setup of preconfigured keyboard configs.

This Pi seems to be powerful enough to where I'm considering using it as my main docker host, but my current docker host is an Alienware M17X R3, which I do not think the 500+ can match across the performance spectrum, but it is a great second choice.  The thing about the Alienware is that it is a laptop and has a functional battery, so if power hiccups or if I lose power, I can gracefully shut down that system.  Plus, that system is quite antiquated for a gaming system, so hosting docker containers is a good use for it.  

Where does this leave me with the 500+?  It means that I can shut down one of my older and less capable systems, which will declutter my office/lab.  

I can actually envision buying several of these to replace old systems.

Everything resides within the keyboard, which is why it is thick.  Actually, the SoC is small AF, though, so I'm not sure why the keyboard is so thick.  The system has a heatsink to dissipate heat - there are no fans, so the system stays quiet.

As this system comes with a 256 GB SSD drive, I did not have to muck with micro SD cards, although I've the option if I feel the need.  The SSD drive is preconfigured with the Rasberry Pi OS.  The SSD drive can also be replaced with something bigger - SSD drive replacements would need to use the M.2 NVMe format.

The system is BT- and Wifi-capable.  It has two mini-HDMI ports, and three USB-A ports (2 x v3 and 1 x v2).  It also has an ethernet port and 16 GB of memory.

I'll be sure to share my Pi journey here.

Ubuntu Desktop 22.04 and Dell XPS 8930

2-3 years ago, I bought my daughter a Dell XPS 8930.  It was nothing special but was a good base in case she needed to expand the system a bit.

Not long after purchase, the motherboard went bad.  I had on-site support for it but never got around to getting it repaired until maybe a month before support expired.  A contractor showed up and replaced the mainboard. 

My daughter only used it a few months then decided to build her own.  The XPS was sitting in a corner, barely used.

I've a cheap system I bought from TigerDirect that is running Ubuntu.  It is currently running Ubuntu Desktop 18.04.  I'd installed Owncloud on it, but the install got jacked up.  it's all out of sync now, package-wise.  I'd attempted to update Owncloud and it choked.  I've not been able to get it running again and it has crucial data on it (it has two drives and the Owncloud data is on the 2nd non-system drive).

I decide to run Ubuntu Desktop 22.04 on the XPS.  I'd initially installed LTS 22.04 but at this time that version has issues with systems that have Nvidia cards and I didn't want a headless system (I already have several of those), so I opted for Desktop.  The Desktop install was seamless.

Desktop 22.04 already has a cloud-based system included in the default install - Nextcloud.  I'm still playing with it but I'll more than likely use that since it's within the Ubuntu repository (Owncloud wasn't when I last checked).

Some things I don't like about these latest Ubuntu versions (noticed this will LTS as well):

• vim wasn't installed by default.  vi is installed by default.  I think this is a licensing thing (I don't believe vim is POSIX).  As well, if vi is already installed, I guess vim wouldn't need to be.  If anyone needs vim, they can use apt to install it post-install.
• ifconfig was not installed by default.  IMO, ifconfig should be essential to a default install.  You might need to troubleshoot a network issue immediately after installing the distro and if you don't have a network connection, you're screwed.  ifconfig is included in the net-tools package.  That package shouldn't be excluded from the base install.

Everything else seems to be good with this distro version, but I'm sure I'll find something amiss as I use the system.