Though the Raspberry Pi 5 has no hope of being a stream setup, it is actually quite a capable standalone dev machine. Early 2025 I spent some time off the workstation, only using the Pi5 for gamedev and such. It was an interesting experience. For 2D games, it gets by fine. 3D, it depends. Considering they're closer to the RG handhelds, I ought to develop on it more. Since I've already got a capture card set up for game streaming, I thought I'd restart my entire Pi5 along with some extra sprucing up to stabilize it.
Before, I was using just the Pi5 itself with a keyboard, mouse, and one USB3 going to a HDD+NVME hub. Doesn't leave space for much else, and it was otherwise just running off a 256GB high endurance SD card, which is still relatively hoping the thing doesn't die. At worst, I had chunked 1GB of RAM in a RAMdisk to save the card some writes.
Luckily, my old System76 laptop had an old 1TB SSD and two 1TB NVMEs. Removed one and got a M.2 hat for the Pi. With SSD prices these days, I find myself inclined to pull out some of my lesser used ones to get extra use.
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The hat took some figuring out, and sticking ribbons between the board and hat is bewildering how it works (once I got it in.) Plugged it in, booted from my SD card, and flashed Raspbian OS Lite with Raspbian's own flasher. For the record, Raspbian's desktop interface is just awful. I wanted to give it a chance but XFCE is so much more useful and powerful without taxing the hardware too bad.
It didn't take long to go from terminal to XFCE fully booting, at least. I still find myself having to remind myself raspi-config exists as it makes stuff easier. Now this is a full and fresh Raspberry Pi running off a terabyte laptop NVME. Way more stable at least than an SD card, maybe even a tiny bit faster. No idea if the Pi's CPU is a bottleneck or if it matters at this hardware tier.
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I'm currently setting things up on my own personal side, but then on top of that, I'll probably have a separate account that I open for streams. It might be fun to see not just Godot on stream, but a full ARM64 Linux development suite. We can't really do Blender or any of the major audio/music applications as on x86_64 Linux or on macOS. But for 2D games, Godot 4.x is pretty capable and I'm interested in doing a full system stream of it sometime soon as I reopen CnC2 and get back into the swing of things. 1TB is also roomy enough to have our sound library on there, which is currently transferring.
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I'd cram it into the new case, but I'm currently waiting for an official Raspberry Pi 5 fan to arrive. My old case had the fan built-in and I'd forgotten. The Pi5 can already run fine on its own, but a fan would be useful when opening Godot or compiling any nonsense. I still am developing on this 2020 iMac, but Linux is still the best for development and a Pi is a small and isolated system that makes it easier to not have a bunch of confidential stuff splash on screen in a public stream. But that's something to look forward on Twitch dev streams soon.
