Curiosity of RiscOS aside, those single core 700 MHz devices I would only advise using them in terminal mode, no desktop, whether Linux, FreeBSD or something else.
On my Linux and BSD machines I tend to run small X setups, without Gnome or anything.
When I first used a pi about 10 years ago, I was surprised at the poor performance. I thought about the X desktops I used 10 years before that (so 20 years ago), and about how their hardware was much worse than a pi. Yet it worked better.
I think there's a few reasons for that.
- Most obviously, software has bloated. This should be less so on a non-DE setup like I typically use, but, seems to be the case still. Within that, I can divide into:
-- actual software bloat. Something like gtk+ is nowhere near as lean as it used to be
-- the fact that the modern web is much more resource intensive than it used to be. It wasn't feasible to browse the web despite being a better CPU than I used for the web many years ago.
-- I think I was using framebuffer based graphics drivers, at full HD. So maybe I paid a price for that, and a proper GPU accelerated X would do better
- SD cards are slow. Maybe disk access over USB would do better.
> It wasn't feasible to browse the web despite being a better CPU than I used for the web many years ago.
Sad but true. Browsers (and Electron-style apps) gorge on CPU and memory and then want more. Office 365 on a 3 GHz x86 seems about as responsive as desktop Word would have been on an 8 MHz 68K.
> I think I was using framebuffer based graphics drivers, at full HD. So maybe I paid a price for that, and a proper GPU accelerated X would do better
Makes a big difference.
> SD cards are slow. Maybe disk access over USB would do better
USB is much better (as long as it's not a slow USB flash drive.) Also Linux distributions constantly write to the filesystem, which is annoying and probably contributes to the issue that turning off or rebooting a Pi can destroy the SD card.
What exactly does "Linux desktop experience" mean. For example, what distribution and what version of Linux for the RPi was used in the test.
Even though I had no plans to run Linux on the original Model B, I saved the "NOOBS" SD card that came with it. It contained presumably "known-to-work" versions of Arch, RaspBMC, Pidora, OpenELEC, RISC and Raspbian. I knew that those offerings would probably balloon in size, or some might possibly disappear, as the RPi project progressed.1 It was early days for the RPi and I was not sure I would be able to easily access those old versions going forward. It is wonderful see one can still conveniently get them (kudos to RPi Foundation):
Based on past experience with computers and software, I concluded that years later the most recent versions of these OS for the RPi would not run smoothly on an old Model B. To be truthful, I still have not tried. Maybe I am wrong, but it sounds like running, e.g., the latest Raspbian on an old Model B would not be a pleasant experience.
Being someone who prefers "terminal mode" over the alternatives, I have always used NetBSD. It was perhaps the first BSD to boot the RPi. It was certainly the first BSD, perhaps the first OS for the RPi, to come with sshd pre-configured so that one could use the RPi "headless" without the need for a serial cable.
Most importantly, AFAIK, NetBSD was the only OS for the RPi that, by default, allowed the SD card to be removed after boot. I recall reading so many comments about SD card wear-and-tear but I have never run the RPi with an SD card mounted R/W. Normally I only use the SD card slot for booting and run the computer with the slot empty.
1. Original NOOBs was 1.1GB. Latest NOOBS is 2.7GB.
The Linux desktop experience on this single core device is horrific.
What is MUCH more impressive is RiscOS on it. It flies. The whole OS is written in assembler. It's fast. It's a what-if of computing. https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi if you're curious to take a look.
Curiosity of RiscOS aside, those single core 700 MHz devices I would only advise using them in terminal mode, no desktop, whether Linux, FreeBSD or something else.