HOW WE TESTED…
The default desktop experience
»ALSO CONSIDER
WE COMPARE TONS OFSTUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!
We spent some time with each distro and carried out typical tasks such as launching and running programs, copying files and installing new software. We also made sure that updating the system worked as it should.
What’s the personality of a distribution?
If you want to go super-lightweight while retaining a full desktop, consider DietPi (https://dietpi.com). Note that setup requires a bit of technical expertise. Gentoo Linux (www.gentoo.org) has a Raspberry Pi edition. Once again, you’ll need to handle some technical issues, in contrast to the distros we’ve been looking at that are relatively plug and play.
Raspberry Pi OS 2022-4-4 Twister OS 2.1.2 Ubuntu 22.04 Pop!_OS 21.10 Manjaro KDE 22.04
Because we’re looking at desktop usage rather than some of the other niche roles that a Raspberry Pi might be employed in, we’re looking for good performance on the higher-end Pis.
For many, the desktop sums up the personality of a distribution. Some of these desktop environments were once only considered suitable for high-end computers, but the Pi hardware has caught up, and none of them are too taxing for a 1.8GHz, four-core Pi 400. That said, there were some minor variations in overall responsiveness from one desktop environment to another, and we’ve noted such occurrences where appropriate.
If you’re an experienced Linux user and you fancy dipping your toes into something really alternative, you could try one of the FreeBSD offerings (www.freebsd.org). BSD is similar enough to Linux that you should be able to find your way around and build a desktop operating system with a difference.
Michael Reed once left his Pi to cool on the windowsill. He soon got a bigger heat sink though.
For our tests we’ve used a Pi 400, the all-in-one model with a four-core 1.8GHz ARM chip and 4GB of RAM. At the time of writing, only the Pi 4 Model B has more memory, with 8GB of RAM, but we tend to find that for typical desktop use, we rarely hit the limit of what a 4GB can offer. The distributions tailored to the Raspberry Pi tend to be more memory efficient, and in general use, we tend not to pile on as many heavyweight applications when using a Pi.
Hopefully, the Super key is assigned to a useful function such as the launcher. That enables application searching and launching without the user having to take their hands off the keyboard.
If Red Hat-based distributions are more your style, it might be worth checking in on the Fedora project (https://getfedora.org). At the time of writing, the Pi is still listed as unsupported as a desktop operating system, but the developers are definitely working on bringing it up to speed.
HOW WE TESTED…
We spent some time with each distro and carried out typical tasks such as launching and running programs, copying files and installing new software. We also made sure that updating the system worked as it should.
Because we’re looking at desktop usage rather than some of the other niche roles that a Raspberry Pi might be employed in, we’re looking for good performance on the higher-end Pis.
For our tests we’ve used a Pi 400, the all-in-one model with a four-core 1.8GHz ARM chip and 4GB of RAM. At the time of writing, only the Pi 4 Model B has more memory, with 8GB of RAM, but we tend to find that for typical desktop use, we rarely hit the limit of what a 4GB can offer. The distributions tailored to the Raspberry Pi tend to be more memory efficient, and in general use, we tend not to pile on as many heavyweight applications when using a Pi.