Any Pi that runs a current browser is enough — this page is three files and its heaviest work is a CSS gradient. Even a Pi Zero 2 W manages; a Pi 3 or later feels instant.

Portrait or landscape?

Either. The layout follows the screen, and rotation is set in the Pi's display settings (Screen Configuration → orientation).

The display is deliberately dark and drifts its numerals a few millimetres over a slow cycle so nothing sits still. Monitors are far less prone than OLED TVs to begin with.

Nothing beyond the hardware you already have. No account, no tracking.

Skarmly · Guide

A Raspberry Pi wall display in kiosk mode

A Pi and a spare monitor make the most durable wall display there is: no battery to age, no app store to abandon it, and when the power cuts out it boots straight back into the page. The whole job is one browser flag — kiosk mode — plus turning off the screen blanking that would otherwise black the wall after ten minutes.

This guide uses Skarmly as the page: the time, the weather, and a background computed from the sun's real position at your coordinates. The link you get from the setup page holds the whole configuration, so the Pi has no state worth backing up — reflash the card, paste the link, done.

The short version

Install Raspberry Pi OS with desktop. Every Pi works; this is a job for whatever Pi is in the drawer.
On another machine, open skarmly.com, pick your town, and copy the link it gives you.
Start Chromium in kiosk mode with that link (below).
Stop the screen from blanking (below).

Chromium in kiosk mode, on boot

Create an autostart entry so the desktop session launches straight into the page full screen — no window chrome, no cursor in the way:

mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart
cat > ~/.config/autostart/skarmly.desktop <<'EOF'
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Skarmly
Exec=chromium-browser --kiosk --noerrdialogs \
  --disable-session-crashed-bubble \
  "https://skarmly.com/#your-link-here"
EOF

Paste your own link in place of the placeholder — everything after the # is your location and preferences. The two extra flags stop Chromium asking about a previous session after a power cut, which would otherwise leave a dialog on the wall.

Stopping the screen blanking

On current Raspberry Pi OS the supported switch lives in raspi-config: Display Options → Screen Blanking → No. That is the whole fix. On older X11-based images, adding xset s off; xset -dpms to the autostart achieves the same.

The monitor's own power saving can still win — if the screen sleeps with blanking off, look for an auto-standby setting in the monitor's menu.

Why a plain page beats a dashboard stack

The usual Pi-dashboard route is a server, a config file, and plugins to maintain. For a clock, the weather and the sky, none of that earns its keep: Skarmly is one URL with no account, refreshes its own forecast, and reloads itself once a day so a deployed fix reaches a screen nobody touches. If the wifi drops, the clock keeps running and the last forecast stays up, labelled with when it was read.

Questions

Which Pi do I need?: Any Pi that runs a current browser is enough — this page is three files and its heaviest work is a CSS gradient. Even a Pi Zero 2 W manages; a Pi 3 or later feels instant.
Portrait or landscape?: Either. The layout follows the screen, and rotation is set in the Pi's display settings (Screen Configuration → orientation).
Does it burn in?: The display is deliberately dark and drifts its numerals a few millimetres over a slow cycle so nothing sits still. Monitors are far less prone than OLED TVs to begin with.
What does it cost?: Nothing beyond the hardware you already have. No account, no tracking.

Skarmly is a free wall display that runs in the browser: the time, the weather, and the sky as it actually is where you are. Set one up in a minute — or see the guides for old iPads and tablets.