The daily driver

The mail order arrived on Monday with the box containing Raspberry Pi 5 + official power adapter, the official active cooler, and a micro-HDMI adapter. Assembly was straightforward. Next up was software.

The Raspberry Pi OS Desktop also comes pre-installed with Chromium browser and Evince document viewer, which are both excellent. I also installed Gimp and considered installing Inkscape.

It’s been running for days now, and needs some ventilation — to prevent increase in board temperature. The portability of this Pi I can get used to. There is also Connect as a service, which is interesting. The backup is as simple as copying the entire volume to an external one via the SD Card Copier, which has no trouble doing it from M.2 SSD to an external SSD either.

It is refreshing to have a simple, minimalist, usable interface without fluff, walled garden annoyances, with the freedom to setup, install, and have a system that is just sufficient and nothing more.¹

Custom keyboard shortcuts

There are a bunch of defaults in labwc, which Raspberry Pi OS adopted late last year, and it took me a while to figure this out, and on how to add custom keyboard shortcuts for some basic things like starting an application, e.g., Chromium with, say, CtrlAlt c , and lock screen with, say, CtrlAlt l . (A couple of defaults I use the most is the window snapping to either left, right, or full screen. These can be done with Meta←, Meta→, or Metaa; where Meta is either Win or Cmd key depending on the keyboard.) Add the keyboard section and key binds to $HOME/.config/labwc/rc.xml within the openbox_config open and close tags. (Ensure they do not clash with the defaults.)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<openbox_config xmlns="http://openbox.org/3.4/rc">
<!-- pre-populated defaults here (leave'em alone) -->

<keyboard>

  <!-- Launch Chromium -->
  <keybind key="C-A-c">
    <action name="Execute" command="chromium"/>
  </keybind>

  <!-- Launch File Explorer -->
  <keybind key="W-e">
    <action name="Execute" command="pcmanfm"/>
  </keybind>

  <!-- Lock screen -->
  <keybind key="C-A-l">
    <action name="Execute" command="dm-tool lock"/>
  </keybind>

</keyboard>

</openbox_config>

If this file is edited, then it should be followed-up by running the following for the settings to reload.

labwc --reconfigure

Update (2025-03): I heard ATP.fm complaining about the state of MacOS’s UI in their episode this week. So I am not alone in this after all. The excess padding, the big radii of window corners, the oddities of controls, the overzealous security, along with a large portion of the little SSD locked-up for system software is all annoying! In contrast, when I fire up Pi, it feels like sanity.

At SCALE 2023, someone asked Ken Thompson what OS does he use today. He said:

I have for most of my life, because I was sort of born into it, run Apple alright? Now recently, meaning within in the last five years, I have become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious but they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it’s OK. And I have come, within the last month or two, to say even though I have invested, you know, zillion years in Apple, I am throwing it away, and I am going to Linux — to Raspbian in particular.

Everything is a trade-off these days; that applies to Raspberry Pi and the OS too. Here are the things that annoy me:

• The non-standard 5A charger; can’t use chargers you already own
• The official case is not designed for active cooler + M.2 SSD HAT
• With active-cooling + the charger, it’s no longer inexpensive
• Raspberry Pi OS’s 4K scaling issues; see below for a solution
• Underpowered GPU. Applications that require it won’t run well
• Screen-saving is buggy; need exiting UI via right-click to get back
• MS Teams (web) won’t pick up webcam or headset attached

Debian Trixie (Oct 2025): This version improves the desktop experience with a few nice touches to the UI. For the longest time since making Pi 5 my daily driver, I struggled with the grainy 1080p monitor that I had to pair it with, since I could not make my Thunderbolt only LG Ultrafine 24-inch 4K monitor. With Trixie and whatever Raspberry Pi team is doing in the background, it seems to work with this monitor. There’s still no scaling-related GUI within the OS, but it seems to work with the following added to ~/.config/labwc/autostart, where the HDMI-A-I port is the one nearest to USB-C power port,² I’ve plugged the cable to:

wlr-randr --output HDMI-A-1 --scale 2.0 &

It does not help with the login screen; remains too small at full 4K resolution and at scale 1.0. But for now, it’s a much smaller annoyance. The type of connector between the monitor and Pi 5 is key. You’ll need a display adapter that carries HDMI signal from the Pi 5, and takes it to the USB-C monitor. The adapter needs external power, since it can’t draw from the HDMI source. It would be fantastic when the Raspberry team includes settings to do this from within the GUI to have both the login and user interface to scale.

2025-11-15: The wait wasn’t long. Setting for scaling is available in the beta channel via raspi-config.³ I did, and my LG UltraFine 24-inch now scales well, and it is comfortable to use again.