The Raspberry Pi 4 is an excellent little computer, but even its biggest fan would have to admit that it’s not very good at streaming fullscreen videos from YouTube. There are some things you can do to improve its performance, but Fenix Pi Mk1 Plasma, a lighter Linux distribution based on the Raspberry Pi OS and running KDE, aims to fix it for good.
The Spanish creator behind Fenix is so into Linux that Chrome’s mouse pointer gains a little Tux penguin when you access the website. As seen in the video from leepspvideo embedded above, it’s able to play a fullscreen 1080p video from YouTube with very few dropped frames on an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 that hasn’t been overclocked. Looking at the video we can see that Fenix Pi is based upon Raspberry Pi OS, which means that installing software and using the GPIO, camera, etc should be a piece of cake, or is that Pi? The OS is also installable to a USB SSD / flash drive making it a good all purpose Pi distro.
The distribution also includes media playing apps such as VLC and Kodi, as well as the Konquerer web browser if Chromium isn’t to your tastes. Interestingly, the default search engine is Ecosia, so you’ll be able to plant a few trees as you search out your full-screen videos. Retro gamers are also well catered for, with RetroPie installed as standard.
Fenix Pi Mk1 Plasma looks like an intriguing distro, one which offers better video streaming performance. But we wonder if it is a match for Twister OS, an OS that has a "kitchen sink" approach to its install?
