Almost 2 weeks into this issue and I have made some progress!
One major consideration is, “What does one want to do with their RasPi”? Once I had it out of the box I was curious about pushing the limits of the performance of the RasPi3B+. Over the last year I have spend quite a bit of time with (essentially) KiCad V5 and figured that for me it would be a good “real world productivity test” instead of running test programs that spit out numbers.
The RasPi3B+ seems to still be too new to have good Google searchable information; what I type here today might be obsolete in 2 weeks.
Ubuntu on the X386 instruction set (I think this is correct) is very well refined from my experiences with it; most “things” just work without having to reboot; this belief really slowed me down with the ARM instruction set.
(There is a video on YouTube about installing Ubuntu Mate onto a RasPi3B+ and it requires also having a RasPi3 to swap the SD card between the two.)
The current answer is “berryboot”. Berryboot has “NOOBS” GUI and also a compatible Ubuntu Mate OS available for installation.
Still not figured out, is exactly how to set up the under/over scan for the monitor that I am using; this can make the WiFi difficult to select to setup.
It took over an hour for me to finally give up on the WiFi to my Hotspot to work. Using Sneaker Net I was all over the place to confirm that all the settings were correct.
Once I re-booted the RasPi, the WiFi connected instantly… hour+ spent on this… not so happy am I.
At this point I updated the OS with the Terminal command. My friend tells me that this might have been a mistake; I did not know any better. There is the option to use a GUI updater thingy that does what the Google inspired Terminal commands do.
The system went to about 11, then decided to inform me that the file location was locked. Another Google and I got a Terminal command to change the lock setting on that folder/file location.
Somewhere in that timeframe I decided to reboot with new updates.
This changed my screen appearance; better but not perfect. At this time I still don’t know how to get the screen resolution to perfectly fit my Sony TV viewing monitor.
WiFi engaged to my Hotspot I navigate to KiCad.org and followed the Terminal text command to download KiCad V5.
I ended up with some version of KiCad V4… not to happy about that; and I do not yet know the fix.
The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ will do many computer tasks reasonably well; especially when considering the price.
There is not a lot of information on the interwebs about pushing this version of the Pi to it’s performance limits.
Anyone have any idea to upgrade to KiCad V5 in Ubuntu Mate?
but it’s not relevant. See