I disagree. The OS doesn’t run a mainline kernel, and the Raspberry Pi devs recommend a clean slate on OS upgrades. Granted, they do some trickery for performance with their Zero (not 2) line, using armhf instead of the slower armel, but this doesn’t excuse the fact that Raspberry Pi OS is so brittle. The builds are also still on 32-bit, even though every Pi since 3B can run 64-bit OSes.
I just run Debian on mine. Can’t be assed to clean flash my devices each major update.
I kinda understood half of the things you said, but i run DietPi on mine.
It has 64-bit support, you can update the os without resetting everything, still based on the original kernels for the closed source optimizations, but removes all the clunky and slow parts, leaving a very lightweight and fast os.
Plus, for newbies (like me) it has a decent built-in installer for various software with minimal ulterior setup required.
It sounds like you’ve found your ideal distro. Great! Not everyone will have the same exact use case for their Pi’s.
I’m just a little disgruntled because I like treating my Pi’s as headless servers, often with a single purpose, and I don’t want to have to erase the SD cards to upgrade versions.
The SOC also isn’t fully open, so you won’t get top tier performance with a purely FOSS stack. I push the limits on mine (Retropie mostly), so using their OS is the better bet (I use the one shipped by Retropie, which is super old).
I actually kinda hate the Raspberry Pi because of how closed it is. It’s gotten a bit better over the years, but the Pi 5 took a big step back. But unfortunately, its competitors aren’t much better, so I still use my RPis, but I probably won’t buy more.
I’m also not a fan of Debian in general, so if I switched, I would probably use openSUSE or Arch instead (I tried Arch, but it had issues syncing to disk after updates; they fixed that, but it shows that other distros will be a bit wonky). Raspbian works, so I stick with it.
That’s very fair. Everyone has a different use for Pi’s, and I just happen to favor long-lived devices that can be updated easily. I wish more of the pi internals were upstreamed too.
My frustration with Raspberry Pi OS is that the packages available were constantly out of date. Some were 2 to 3 years out of date.
I eventually started using Alpine linux on my Pi boards and have been happy since then. Now I can use the latest Docker and Podman packages without manually adding new repositories.
If I didn’t prefer Alpine’s minimal approach, I would have probably gone with Debian because of it’s history in stability.
I can appreciate that about Debian. Common tools and stability can be both convinient and reliable. Learning linux is already overwhelming with choices.
Even though I use Alpine for all my Pi boards and laptop, I keep a live usb partition of Linux Mint Debian Edition as my emergency backup. It just works.
I haven’t tried arch at all. I used Linux Mint for a year, LMDE for a year and only really started working with command line since last December. I think I chose to try Alpine because I wanted my web facing devices to have the least amount of software installed. Security-wise it made sense to me to have less surface area to exploit.
It took a bit extra effort for me to learn how to use OpenRC as the init system. As well as learning Linux from a bare bones linux perspective.
I actually found using Busy-box Ash interesting to work with and that’s the only shell I currently use. I even wrote a whole script around Rsync in a POSIX friendly way because I liked the idea portable scripting.
If you’re interested, I can send you a link that contains the setup notes for my server. It’s about 85% of my setup process, the rest being some files that are mostly customization that I rsync into place towards the end of the setup process. That can give you an idea of what Alpine on ARM is like.
The 64-bit version is built directly from Debian for the arm64 platform, while the 32-bit version is derived from Raspbian, a customized Debian variant created in 2012 for the original Raspberry Pi.
I do on some of mine because it makes some of the automation i have for them simpler to maintain when it is also applied to x86 hardware or virtual machines. It used to be a huge pain to use on a pi but it works pretty well these days, especially since about 24.04 I want to say.
People run Ubuntu on their Pis?
Yeah, I always run Raspbian.
This is probably a hot take, but:
I disagree. The OS doesn’t run a mainline kernel, and the Raspberry Pi devs recommend a clean slate on OS upgrades. Granted, they do some trickery for performance with their Zero (not 2) line, using armhf instead of the slower armel, but this doesn’t excuse the fact that Raspberry Pi OS is so brittle. The builds are also still on 32-bit, even though every Pi since 3B can run 64-bit OSes.
I just run Debian on mine. Can’t be assed to clean flash my devices each major update.
I kinda understood half of the things you said, but i run DietPi on mine.
It has 64-bit support, you can update the os without resetting everything, still based on the original kernels for the closed source optimizations, but removes all the clunky and slow parts, leaving a very lightweight and fast os.
Plus, for newbies (like me) it has a decent built-in installer for various software with minimal ulterior setup required.
It sounds like you’ve found your ideal distro. Great! Not everyone will have the same exact use case for their Pi’s.
I’m just a little disgruntled because I like treating my Pi’s as headless servers, often with a single purpose, and I don’t want to have to erase the SD cards to upgrade versions.
The SOC also isn’t fully open, so you won’t get top tier performance with a purely FOSS stack. I push the limits on mine (Retropie mostly), so using their OS is the better bet (I use the one shipped by Retropie, which is super old).
I actually kinda hate the Raspberry Pi because of how closed it is. It’s gotten a bit better over the years, but the Pi 5 took a big step back. But unfortunately, its competitors aren’t much better, so I still use my RPis, but I probably won’t buy more.
I’m also not a fan of Debian in general, so if I switched, I would probably use openSUSE or Arch instead (I tried Arch, but it had issues syncing to disk after updates; they fixed that, but it shows that other distros will be a bit wonky). Raspbian works, so I stick with it.
That’s very fair. Everyone has a different use for Pi’s, and I just happen to favor long-lived devices that can be updated easily. I wish more of the pi internals were upstreamed too.
My frustration with Raspberry Pi OS is that the packages available were constantly out of date. Some were 2 to 3 years out of date.
I eventually started using Alpine linux on my Pi boards and have been happy since then. Now I can use the latest Docker and Podman packages without manually adding new repositories.
If I didn’t prefer Alpine’s minimal approach, I would have probably gone with Debian because of it’s history in stability.
I believe you may have found your ideal OS. Debian will always lag behind ever so often. And that’s okay. We all use the Pi’s for different reasons.
I can appreciate that about Debian. Common tools and stability can be both convinient and reliable. Learning linux is already overwhelming with choices.
Even though I use Alpine for all my Pi boards and laptop, I keep a live usb partition of Linux Mint Debian Edition as my emergency backup. It just works.
I went with Arch Linux on ARM for a minimal approach - did you try that?
Genuninely interested in your experience of Alpine Linux as I’d not considered it on a Pi (only VMs so far…)
I haven’t tried arch at all. I used Linux Mint for a year, LMDE for a year and only really started working with command line since last December. I think I chose to try Alpine because I wanted my web facing devices to have the least amount of software installed. Security-wise it made sense to me to have less surface area to exploit.
It took a bit extra effort for me to learn how to use OpenRC as the init system. As well as learning Linux from a bare bones linux perspective.
I actually found using Busy-box Ash interesting to work with and that’s the only shell I currently use. I even wrote a whole script around Rsync in a POSIX friendly way because I liked the idea portable scripting.
If you’re interested, I can send you a link that contains the setup notes for my server. It’s about 85% of my setup process, the rest being some files that are mostly customization that I rsync into place towards the end of the setup process. That can give you an idea of what Alpine on ARM is like.
It’s also 64 since 2 years I believe.
The devs have started releasing 64-bit builds since then, yes. However, they still push people to the 32-bit builds: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/
I understand their thinking. They want a unified build experience, to simplify their development and user experience.
Isnt Raspberry PIOS debian based?
Yup.
Sry morning brain fart. Read it’s ubuntu based
It’s Debian based:
Yeah, that’s what I thought. Same.
Ubuntu Core, to be specific.
The Linux distro that requires you to create an account on their platform?
“Requires to create an account” for what exactly? I’m a long term Ubuntu user without any Ubuntu one account.
gross.
I do on some of mine because it makes some of the automation i have for them simpler to maintain when it is also applied to x86 hardware or virtual machines. It used to be a huge pain to use on a pi but it works pretty well these days, especially since about 24.04 I want to say.