Some great light lightweight apps for a 4GB Pi:
- Homeassistant
- Fresh RSS
- Paperless NGX
- Syncthing
- PiHole or Adguard home
- Syncthing
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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PiHole is a pretty light load, as are Home Assistant and Music Assistant. Frigate starts to make some heat, so don't expect to get a full blown video classification / recording system.
I use my Pi 4B as a DVR for movies and OTA television (MythTV).
There are other tools that handle playback better (OSMC/Kodi, etc) but Myth's configuration and handling of recording schedules is incredibly powerful. Conflict management works well and it can record multiple streams off the same tuner so conflicts are reduced in the first place.
Joplin notes. A really nice notetaking app you can selfhost. Simple enough but stil verry advanced.
irks me that it’s mostly idling
Well it's a small processor and relatively efficient one at that so... how about going the opposite direction? How about measuring the power draw on idle? With other task? I don't actually know if that architecture handles that but I saw some things on the do https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100095/0002/functional-description/power-management/dynamic-power-management?lang=en
Also what about using a RPi Zero instead?
let it run dwarf fortress from within the terminal, then ssh into it from wherever you are so you can play df from anywhere in the world. i did this at work.
AdGuard Home (I prefer it to PiHole)
OtterWiki
Wireguard
Forgejo
Tandoor
Can I please ask why you prefer Adguard over Pihole?
The sd card in my raspberry 3b recently died, and my pihole with it. I am now using Adguard but not sure it's working well for me, consider going back. What's the winning argument for you?
Skimmed the title. Brain registered words "rpi" and "linux" underneath it. Instant reaction: "Not another app package format please". 😶🌫️
I should spend more time reading properly & less time being an old man yelling at tech.
Get yourself and adsb antenna and feed flightaware, flightradar24, and adsbexchange. Help track the skies!
Jellyfin music server. It needs about 1.2 GB of RAM for itself, plus the system.
My PI with podman jellyfin and flatnotes is sitting at 600 MB ram
Mine needs 1.3 GB with an itunes library of 160 gb.
Paperless ngx
You could also setup a git repo for your config files. That way you could revert changes, if you break something.
If you don't want do open your pi up to the internet you could take a look at tailscale. I use this script on my laptop and home pc to share files with sshfs while having any other traffic go through mullvad. Set this up on your pi with it as an exit node and you basically have access from anywhere.
Pihole, homeassistant, a music server using moodeaudio
Another vote for Pi-hole here. I don’t know how I lived without it before!
Does PiHole ever break a family member’s browsing, and then they don’t know to fix the issue because it would involve understanding opening up the PiHole web interface?
Yes, that does sometimes happen but the frequency depends on the blocking list used, or if multiple lists are used. When a family member encounters something like this, I can usually quite quickly identify the relevant blocked item and whitelist it.
I use an adblocker on both my PC and my phone. Does a Pi-hole have many advantages over that?
PiHole is DNS based ad blocking and local DNS for everything on your network. So, even things that can’t run their own adblocker.
Not just ad blocker, but tracking blockers too. Also, if you've got a simple little device like a WiFi controlled outlet switch, and through PiHole you notice it "phoning home" frequently even though you're not using it.... that's a clue that you might not want to be keeping such things inside the same network where you check on your 401(k) account...
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One major advantage is that on the domestic TV channels here in the UK which have ad breaks (essentially all of them except the BBC) it removes the ads altogether and the programmes run seamlessly from the part before the ad break into the part after. I still smile every time it happens!
That sounds cool as heck! But I am very confused about how television broadcasting works in the UK. This only works with some sort of over-the-internet TV, right?
Yes, that’s right. It would only work with TV over the internet and not with a digital signal transmitted direct to the TV via aerial.
Another vote for PiHole. It keeps your home network cleaner by ignoring the ads.
On my Rpi4B I run syncthing 24/7. It acts as my sync hub. All other machines are connected to it.
SANE scan server? Paperless ngx also comes to my mind, find it pretty useful.
I was trying to set up a scan server last week. No luck yet. 😅
Paperless ngx looks looks amazing. I was actually thinking of finding a solution for this type of thing as pdfgrep was getting kinda slow.
I run AdGuard Home, WireGuard and a couple of other things on my 4B, all in Docker.
I used to run HomeAssistant on our for a while, but they stopped supporting that architecture (armhf?). Also used to run Unbound on it.
HomeAssistant is still supported on Pi4b
It's support for the rpi3 that is getting fased out.
Odd, it must be the Docker image I'm using, then. Thanks for clarifying.
qbittorrent (docker) 😁😎
PiHole, PiVPN, maybe a reverse proxy like nginx proxy manager to make connecting to your various web management portals you have an easy way to map it to a human readable url
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