Viewing topic Distro Suggestions RaspberryPi 4

Distro Suggestions RaspberryPi 4

sourpuz Aug 3, 2022

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Dear forumites,

I dug out my RaspberryPi 4 (4GB) a while ago and played a bit with RaspberryPi OS, which seems to have come along nicely. But I'm not entirely happy with it, examples are the default desktop, the decision to turn off the sudoers password, and some others. Yes, all of these can be changed and tweaked, but I'd love to have a more comfortable experience out of the box. In your opinion and experience, what is the best distro to use the Pi as a small, frugal desktop PC? To do your everyday browsing, some coding and play a few (retro) games?

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Pengling Aug 4, 2022

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My daily-driver desktop machine is a Raspberry Pi 4, and honestly, my best experience with it has been with Raspberry Pi OS, quirks and all. As you say, it can be tweaked, and that's just what I've done with it.

Now, if there was an official Xubuntu image for it (which is what I use on everything else), I'm sure that I'd feel differently, but when I last checked you were expected to tweak the available Ubuntu image to get that, so this solution ultimately shared issues with Raspberry Pi OS for me, and I ended up going back to that.

I'm sorry that I couldn't suggest better, but I hope that it was worth sharing my experience of it.

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sourpuz Aug 4, 2022

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Thanks, Pengling! Maybe that is the best way, have you installed XFCE on it? I've come across DietPi, which seems to be a very frugal Debian distro tailored to ARM SBCs. Maybe I'll give that a shot.

Quoting: PenglingMy daily-driver desktop machine is a Raspberry Pi 4, and honestly, my best experience with it has been with Raspberry Pi OS, quirks and all. As you say, it can be tweaked, and that's just what I've done with it.

Now, if there was an official Xubuntu image for it (which is what I use on everything else), I'm sure that I'd feel differently, but when I last checked you were expected to tweak the available Ubuntu image to get that, so this solution ultimately shared issues with Raspberry Pi OS for me, and I ended up going back to that.

I'm sorry that I couldn't suggest better, but I hope that it was worth sharing my experience of it.

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Pengling Aug 4, 2022

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Quoting: sourpuzThanks, Pengling!

No problem.

Quoting: sourpuzMaybe that is the best way, have you installed XFCE on it?

I haven't yet, as I've found Lxde to be pretty inoffensive to my Xfce sensibilities!

That said, I do plan to, since I'd like to have my desktop experience fairly consistent with that of my portables, and my meddling with the official Ubuntu image suggests that Xfce works well on the hardware.

Quoting: sourpuzI've come across DietPi, which seems to be a very frugal Debian distro tailored to ARM SBCs. Maybe I'll give that a shot.

I've only vaguely heard of DietPi, so I'd be very interested to hear about your experiences if you do!

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