Distro editions
Alternative editions and variants to hone the experience and adapt to special requirements.
We’re mainly interested in variants of a distribution that are available for a Pi, but we’re also interested in editions that are available for other hardware such as desktop and laptop PCs. It’s always handy if you can maintain some consistency between all of the machines that you manage.
Raspberry Pi OS is the only distribution that we’d recommend for typical desktop use on anything less powerful than a Pi 4 or 400. As well as editions that are tailored to running on a Pi 4/400, Raspberry Pi OS also offers a Lite edition without a desktop. Raspberry Pi Desktop is a version that runs on regular desktop PCs while offering much the same environment.
Twister OS is the only OS that we’ve looked at which doesn’t offer a 64-bit edition. 64-bit OSes offer slightly better performance on a Pi 4 or 400 at the cost of some software compatibility. Twister OS has a Lite variant with less software included. Twister UI can be installed on regular desktop PCs.
Manjaro is the only one of the distributions we’ve looked at that’s a rolling distribution, which some might prefer. As well as being a major desktop PC Linux distribution MATE, Gnome and Xfce editions are available for the Pi in addition to the KDE Plasma edition that we looked at here.
Ubuntu has editions to support most platforms and many variants with different desktop environments on top. For the Pi, Canonical’s Desktop edition is 64-bit only and features Gnome as the desktop, which is the version that we’ve looked at here. There’s also a server edition that runs without a desktop and is available in 32- and 64-bit variants. The same is true for the Pi versions of its Core edition that are designed for embedded use.
Pop!_OS keeps things simple, with a main edition of the distro available for desktop PCs and a Raspberry Pi edition. The releases are synchronised with Ubuntu releases. At time of writing, the Pi edition appears to lag slightly behind the desktop PC edition in terms of release speed.