Raspberry Pi Touch Operating Systems

1 UBUNTU TOUCH

On paper, Ubuntu Touch should be the touch OS of choice for Raspberry Pi users. It’s been in development for years, continued beyond Canonical’s abandonment thanks to the UBports team, and recently added Raspberry Pi support. However, builds are unreliable at this stage. While Ubuntu Touch might be the best option for Raspberry Pi tablet projects in future, try at your own risk (http://bit.ly/LXF261-ubports).

3 LUNEOS

Most people have forgotten webOS, HP’s mobile OS that was abandoned after its phones and tablets line went south. These days it’s usually seen as the OS on LG smart TVs. Its mobile version is known as LuneOS, which retains the look and feel of webOS. Relatively stable, it’s a strong alternative to Plasma Mobile. Nightly and stable releases can be found at webos-ports.org (http://bit.ly/ LXF261-webos).

2 SAILPI (SAILFISH OS)

While Sailfish OS has been abandoned, a version was released for the Raspberry Pi 2. Dubbed SailPi, it combines the Sailfish OS with support for the Pi’s GPIO. Sadly, the project hasn’t been updated within the past five years, but if you’re looking for a basic OS with a web browser, this is good enough. You can grab SailPi from the Internet Archive (http://bit.ly/LXF261-sailospi).

4 PLASMA MOBILE

A solution to your Raspberry Pi touchscreen project that works very well, Plasma Mobile runs on Raspbian Lite. Importantly, this lets you retain that important integration between the Raspberry Pi and its default operating system. Plasma Mobile is the best non-Android touch OS for the Raspberry Pi. See the boxout overleaf for a look at how to set up Plasma Mobile on the Raspberry Pi.