Chapter 9
The Pi as a Productivity Machine
THE FLEXIBILITY OF the Raspberry Pi makes it a good choice as a low-power, general-purpose desktop computer. Although it will never reach the same level of performance as a standard desktop or laptop, its low cost and environmentally friendly power consumption help to make up for any problems with occasionally sluggish performance.
Although the Raspberry Pi-specific Raspbian distribution provided on the official website doesn’t include any of the usual productivity software you might expect of a general-purpose PC—such as a word processor, spreadsheet or image editing—you can install such software via the apt-get command. You can also skip the local installation and use cloud-based software through the web browser, which can offer improved performance over locally installed packages at the cost of flexibility and advanced functionality.
Using either of the methods described in this chapter—locally installed applications or cloud-based services—the Pi can be used as a day-to-day machine for office and school work, while not harming its usability as a platform for programming and experimentation.
Using Cloud-Based Apps
If you use your Pi connected to the ...
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