Someone Asks How I Use A Five Dollar Computer

SOMEONE ASKS ME how I use Raspberry Pi for word processing and music editing.   I use a very simple text editor (free)* and Libreoffice (free) for word processing on a five-dollar Raspberry Pi Zero ($5 US, 10 if you get a Pi Zero W with wi-fi capacity) with a Raspberry Pi keyboard and mouse (they are inexpensive and very good).   I use a Pi 3B+ (about $35) with both Audacity and MuseScore (both free and surprisingly good)**for doing music.  

While some are reliving their past and largely imaginary glory, I'm getting ready for perhaps going back to ingloriously teaching, hopefully full time, by writing exercises and ear training MP3s for my future students, and my own, personal work which will probably die with me.  I compose because it pleases me to, I'm not under any illusions that an audience for it is around.  That's one of the more satisfying things about composing for a computer, I can simulate something approximating the sound of an ensemble which there is every reason to believe would never play one of my pieces.  

I believe both of those programs will run on a $5 Pi but I haven't tried it yet.  I would like to install my old far simpler but entirely adequate to my purposes Windows based audio-editor on a Pi Zero using Wine but haven't tried that yet.  

While I'm always on the look out for a usable junker (a 32 bit one at the moment) I'll never buy anything but single-board computers in the future.  I was tempted to buy a Raspberry Pi 400 ($70, though I'd get the full kit for about $100)  but will probably opt for buying a naked Pi 4 (or maybe 5 by the time I get round to needing one)*** and plugging peripherals into it because I hate all-in-one things, something I won't be able to fix is bound to happen to one of those.  If I needed a new keyboard I'd rather just plug one in.  Though if anyone is thinking of it, those look mighty tempting.

* I don't have FeatherPad, my favorite multi-language text editor on a Pi, though it would seem I could using Snapcraft (haven't tried that yet).  I like Featherpad because it has a good dark screen mode and dictionaries for all of the language I'd ever consider using.  Though other text editors have the same features.  

I like using a text editor for writing because when I copy and paste into another program it doesn't impose a lot of formatting that will need to be undone. 

**  On Windows I was an early and confirmed Finale user.  I would still like to use it, especially for the built in collection of sound samples and hope to learn how to meld the two.  I'm not much of a geek except what I need to do at the time.  I was never impressed with Sibelius software as any kind of an improvement on Finale.  

***  You'll want to get some good heat sinks for it, so I understand, probably the ones that cost less than ten dollars will be fine if you don't shut it up in a closed case but I don't have any direct experience with them.