“Lovely piece of kit. Works well and seems faster and more responsive than the 400. Able to use my Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm) and Ubuntu Arm 24.04 LTS from my 400 machine. with no trouble. However please note, if you are thinking of using another ARM OS directly swapped from your 400 - they may not work. At the time of writing, please be aware that the following do not work on my new 500 yet: notably Manjaro, Twister, Debian, MX Linux, Raspberry Pi OS (Bulls Eye/Buster), Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Chromium OS, POP! OS, Kali, Fedora, Fyde OS and OpenSUSE- in case you were to use them. I appreciate that it is early days, but I am looking forward to getting them all working on the new 500 in the future. My 2025 project. Please note that this review is purely an observation and not a criticism of the 500, which as I said above is a lovely piece of kit...”
“It was delivered very quickly, but without any shred of documentation.
The number of USB ports has been reduced from four to three, and
one of those is said to be slow. Perhaps that's as it doesn't need a
port for to connect the keyboard. LibreOffice wasn't automatically installed.
Waiting for the magazine #149 to find out more”
“Given that I already have five other Pi SBCs of different versions it was very familiar but the design and build are very good. It's happily driving a 3440x1440 widescreen monitor with no problems at all. Good quality sound via HDMI from the screen's speakers. The keyboard has a nice feel and although small it is not a after using a full-size keyboard. No signs yet of any dirt being pick-up by the white keys.”
“Brilliant and astonishingly fast running off a uSD card (A2, supplied). I have a couple of Pi5's with nvme cards added and I can hardly 'feel' the difference in general desktop use.
Also good value with keyboard included compared to the 8GB Pi5 which is only about £10 cheaper.”
