Raspberry Pi 400 and 500 • RPi 500 as Desktop Questions

Hello everyone.

I'm brand new to the Raspberry Pi world having just bought a Pi 500 as a cheap desktop alternative. While I have very little experience with Linux (Ubuntu spercificlly), I'm happy to learn.

However, I've a few questions.

• I use Google Drive, Google Photos, etc quite a lot. I've read some people have had trouble with Google but it was unclear if that meant accessing the services at all or specifically syncing with their Pi and online. Will I be able to use Drive and Photos fine simply online or does that present issues?
• On my (dying) laptop I use MediaMonkey to sync music between my laptop and phone. However, there is no Linux version. Does anyone know of anything that might do a similar job?
• I've seen mention of Wine for running Windows apps on Linux. Does this work OK in PiOS? It may solve my music issue, and a few other things, if so.
• Is there any benefit over using Chromium to Firefox on the PiOS (or any other browser)?
• On these forums and elsewhere it seems people always recommend doing things via command line. Is always the best way, or are there GUI alternatives?
• The 500 comes with the OS on a 32 GB SD. If I wanted more internal memory would it be better replace this with a larger SD, or to get a secondary storage device?
• Given my use case (what I've mentioned above) would I be better to stick with PiOS or use Ubuntu? Ubuntu seems to support more apps (and looks much nicer), but from what I've seen most say PiOS runs better...so yeah. Not sure what I should go with here.

If you've any other advice for a noob like me it'd be much appreciated.

Cheers.

Statistics: Posted by JoeyPajamas — Wed Feb 19, 2025 6:17 pm — Replies 3 — Views 57

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