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This review first appeared in issue 354 of PC Pro.
Many distributions are available in full-fat and light editions. Zorin and Linux Mint are good examples, each giving a choice of Gnome- or Xfce-based ISOs. Debian with Raspberry Desktop, which closely resembles Raspberry Pi OS, is different. Available for PCs after a decade as the default OS for the eponymous single-board computer, it uses neither Gnome nor Xfce, but PIXEL, the Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight, which itself is based on the lightweight LDXE desktop manager.
Don’t let the “lightweight” moniker put you off. PIXEL sports many features familiar from rival environments, including a menu bar, application menu, desktop icons and context menus. It does lack some frills, though. There are no widgets, as there are in Mint, you can’t snap windows to the edges of the screen for easy arrangement, and it lacks Zorin’s visual flair.
However, it does boot extremely quickly, it has every feature you’re likely to need, and its options and settings are as easy to find as they are to understand.
The operating system’s original name – Raspbian – hint at its Debian roots. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking you were installing stock Debian when working your way through the installer, as there’s no mention of Raspberry Pi to be found.
It’s built on Bullseye (Debian 11) and the Linux 5.10 kernel, both of which are starting to show their age. Debian is currently at 12.2 (Bookworm), on which the regular Raspberry Pi OS for single-board computers is based, and it supports the 6.1 kernel.
Where Raspberry Pi has produced its own imager for setting up Raspberry Pi OS, which also handles user creation, configuring SSH, establishing Wi-Fi credentials and so on, the process for installing Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop is much like that for most other distributions. Download the ISO, write it to a bootable USB drive, and boot the installer from there. Around ten minutes later, we were sitting in front of the desktop, with a full complement of essential applications ready to be used.
The pre-installed office suite is LibreOffice 7.0.4 (the latest is 7.6), Claws is installed to manage mail, and the default web browser is Chromium. Other applications can be installed via the Add/Remove Software tool, or using APT through the Terminal. We opted for the latter to install Firefox and Thunderbird, and in each case it set up version 115. This is particularly welcome where Thunderbird is concerned, as 115 marked a significant interface refresh, which makes the suite a more pleasant environment in which to spend the working day.
Elsewhere, the list of pre-installed apps is a reminder that Raspberry Pi is popular in STEM environments, coding and automation. Both Geany Programmer’s Editor and the excellent Thonny IDE are in evidence, alongside Scratch and Mu. So is the SmartSim circuit designer.
VLC and an image viewer are both pre-installed, but GIMP (for bitmap graphics), Inkscape (vectors) and Shotwell (photos) all need to be installed manually – if you use them. Again, this can be done through the Add/Remove Software utility, but this isn’t as friendly as the equivalent installers in Ubuntu, Mint and co, presenting sometimes extensive lists of options in response to a search, each accompanied by the same default icon. You might occasionally find yourself scratching your head, wondering which you need.
PIXEL includes a Recommended Software tool, which does allow you to sidestep both the software installer and APT for a handful of common applications, but the three mentioned in the previous paragraph are absent. We’d like to see them included in the next refresh.
While we’ve griped about a few aspects of Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop, there’s much to recommend it. It’s extremely fast to boot, the PIXEL interface is refreshingly distraction-free, and it’s compact enough to be a reasonable option for running full-time from a USB thumb drive.
Yes, it’s starting to look outdated in places (note that it was released in July 2022), but Raspberry Pi tells us an update is planned, which is expected, although not guaranteed, to arrive before Easter. In the meantime, if you’re looking to recycle some older hardware as a no-frills workhorse, or want to use the same environment on your single-board computer and desktop, this distro could be just what you’re after.
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