OS for Raspberry Pi – Best Operating system
If you thought that the Raspberry Pi foundation limits itself to the wide market of microcontrollers and small single-board computers, then you might want to rethink!
The company has not only created products that help its users in opening the gate to the world of IoT but also dabbled into the arena of the operating systems.
Yes, you read it right, the Raspberry Pi family even has its own operating system with some super-efficient and noteworthy features. These have not only improved over the years with more stable processing power and higher memory but is the most compatible operating system for your Raspberry Pi boards.
But first, let’s have a look at its background and the different versions that have been upgraded.
Raspberry Pi operating system background
The Raspberry Pi OS is also known as the Raspbian and is a Debian based operating system introduced by the company. Thus the range of operating systems is placed into the UNIX-Like family of operating systems.
The initial version of this OS was released on July 15, 2012, after which the company has constantly improved its features. The OS comes with over 35,000 packages: precompiled software bundled in a nice format for easy installation on your Raspberry Pi.
You can simply install the official OS for your Raspberry Pi using the Raspberry Pi Imager.
Current Raspberry Pi operating systems work on all Pi boards except for Raspberry Pi Pico due to its smaller size and computing power
Updated versions of the RaspberryPi OS
Over the years, the company has released various versions of their official Raspberry Pi operating systems upgrading from the 32-bit processors to the 64-bit for efficiency reasons. These are as follows (in no specific order):
- RaspberryPi OS Lite 32bit
- RaspberryPi OS Lite 64 bit
- RaspberryPi OS 32-bit
- RaspberryPi OS 64 bit
- RaspberryPi OS Full 32-bit
- RaspberryPi OS (Legacy) with desktop 32 bit
- RaspberryPi OS Lite (Legacy) 32 bit
- Debian Buster with RaspberryPi Desktop 32bit
You can download the Raspberry Operating systems from the attached links as per your device’s capacity.
How has the Raspberry Pi Operating system improved?
The last Raspberry Pi OS that we saw was the Raspberry Pi OS 10 ie Buster.
The latest update that the foundation has released is the Raspberry Pi OS 11 aka bullseye, which comes with a ton of upgrades regarding the desktop environment and to support the Raspberry Pi hardware.
- GTK+3
- common notification manager
- speed boost
- updated PiCamera driver
- using Mutter instead of Openbox for window management
- Replacing GTK+2 with GTK+3
- updated experience for installed packages
- update to the Chromium browser (v92)
However, a lot many users might find it hard to switch to the Bullseye due to certain technical difficulties. Well, worry not! Because the company has released the Raspberry Legacy 32-bit to save you! Here is what the Legacy version of your RaspberryPi OS holds:
- based on the Debian Buster
- upstream software-accelerated browser
- 5.10 Linux kernel
- stable environment to work
You can use the best OS from RaspberryPi for your device as per your need and preferences. Both are great choices and give the highest efficiency!
We are looking forward to more releases from the Raspberry Pi family with great updates and high speed and stability both in 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems.
See also: RP2040 – Raspberry’s first microcontroller chip
Let us know what you think about ‘best Raspberry Pi Operating system for download and use’ in the comment section below.
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Reference:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-32-bit
https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/
