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.
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My frustration with Raspberry Pi OS is that the packages available were constantly out of date. Some were 2 to 3 years out of date.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.
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.
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.
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.