"The Pi 400 itself has similar specifications to a Raspberry Pi 4, but the whole thing is contained inside the keyboard unit."
We’ve decided to see how viable a Raspberry Pi 400 is as a Linux-based ‘daily driver’ machine, and attempt to use it for day-to-day tasks in place of a standard desktop PC. The Pi 400 itself has similar specifications to a Raspberry Pi 4, but the whole thing is contained inside the keyboard unit. As part of the test, the bulk of this article was written on the Pi.
We’ll start at the beginning, by looking at the device itself. Sat on a desk, the Pi looks like a white compact keyboard, but it’s a tad heavier and fuller once you turn it over in your hands. Around the back, there are various connectors. From right to left these are: Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, two USB 3.0 sockets, USB C power, two micro HDMI sockets, a miniSD socket and finally a 40-pin Raspberry Pi GPIO header. Under the hood the Pi 400 sports a quad-core ARM chip clocked at 1.8GHz and 4GB of RAM. Neither of these can be upgraded, and the RAM is shared between the CPU and GPU.
There are no analogue audio ins and outs, so we alternated between a USB audio adaptor (Lexicon Alpha) and some Bluetooth headphones. Both of these solutions worked flawlessly. The Pi 400 can also transmit audio through the HDMI connectors alongside the video data, if you have a suitable display.
Connecting it all up
For our purposes, we connected the official mouse and the
