Raspberry Pi OS

Reader supplied reviews for Raspberry Pi OS Average rating 7.4 from 14 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. Please selecting a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Raspberry Pi OS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 2024-11-192023-05-032020-12-022019-04-082018-11-132017-07-052015-02-16 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 2023-12-05 Rating: 7 Date: 2024-01-01 Votes: 4 They released an update to the firmware that helps with how hot the PI5 can get. It doesn't appear to install automatically, though. You have to use `rpi-update` to install it. (Which is why it wasn't the first thing I tried over the last week or two, to help with the PI5 performance issues.) You can check your version of the firmware with `sudo rpi-eeprom-update`. The December 14th release seems to be working well and cut down the heat issues I'd been having by between 2-10C. It's a bit inconsistent with temperature, though. Sometimes, the temperature will shoot up and then go down. Before, the temperature was more consistent, but it was also hotter on average. I'd consider this an improvement and I'm grateful they put it out -- credit where it's due. It was disappointing to have a machine that didn't work well that was brand new when I first got the PI5. Note: If you're worried about messing with the firmware, just record all the info that's spit out in the terminal, that way you can revert the firmware to your previous version if you encounter any issues. The output of `rpi-update` lists both the previous and updated firmware versions. In regards to desktop environments, with the PI5, the best performance I've gotten is out of Wayland-backed KDE Plasma. You'd think a beefy desktop environment like KDE would run more slowly, but there's something about how Wayland and the PI5 interact that allows it to work better. (You can also get reasonably good performance out of GNOME, but I'm not a fan of GNOME -- it lacks a lot of features that are in KDE for customization and the performance doesn't suffer at all. If anything, I found KDE a bit more responsive.) I also don't think the fixes are out yet for X11 in regards to the blinking cursor issue, etc. GDM is slower than Lightdm, but works better at setting Plasma/Wayland as the default when logging in. SDDM is buggy and glitchy with the mouse (on Bookworm, but not Bullseye, though you can't use Bullseye with the PI5 -- not exactly thrilled about being locked in to the much-more-glitchy Bookworm). If you're comfortable installing Lightdm and editing the .conf file, it's faster to start up and you can manually set the default to Plasma/Wayland. It will default to X11 sessions, otherwise, and you'll have to select Plasma/Wayland on login each time. GDM is slower, but I found that it remembered my previous choice without having to edit anything. I'd consider this an improvement for now. But, I still look forward to refinements with X11 performance, some more firmware tweaks, etc. It is moving in the right direction, though. I'd be happy to rate it higher as future fixes/refinements come out. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2023-12-05 Rating: 5 Date: 2023-12-19 Votes: 1 I went through testing every desktop environment available on tasksel with the Raspberry PI 5 and the newest release of Raspberry PI OS (64-bit) available for rpi-imager. Because, why not? MATE was the only one that didn't have a problem with either mouse flashing or screen tearing on the default installation. Everything else was either choppy or flashing or both. I tried changing the backend for xfwm4 to xpresent (this was the best selection for MATE in MATE Tweak and it was also referenced on the official forums as a 'fix' for XFCE), but it didn't stop screen tearing from happening with the Kodi flatpak on XFCE. On contrast, the Kodi flatpak worked well under MATE. I reduced my rating to a 5/10, because with the Raspberry PI 5, compatibility isn't much of a benefit anymore. There are real issues with getting a desktop environment to work comfortably on the Raspberry PI 5 and I really don't think the hardware should've been released without software/firmware already in place to allow for better compatibility. Since the hardware and software are really designed to go together, I consider this a really important aspect of the OS, unlike with other distros. As a side note and for the sake of comparison, I also tried the Ubuntu server installation for Raspberry PI 5. It took an eternity to install xubuntu-desktop (even on 8GB RAM and a wired, fast Internet connection), and it ran terribly -- even after replacing the XFCE backend with xpresent. At this stage, I don't consider it it be a viable alternative. It really was the only alternative distro I got to work, which makes Raspberry PI OS compatibility with the hardware that much more important. I'll keep up to date on new releases and really hope this gets fixed soon. I'd be glad to add a handful of stars to my rating when that happens. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2023-12-05 Rating: 7 Date: 2023-12-15 Votes: 0 The Raspberry PI 5 (8GB) does well with the MATE desktop -- installed through the Lite (64-bit) installer -- and is a preferable experience compared to the default PIXEL desktop. But, the limited compatibility of Raspberry PI hardware among distros makes me reluctant to ever get more Raspberry PI hardware. I was hoping that with the release of the PI 5, they would've fixed a lot of the issues in the default PIXEL desktop, but no such luck. It's still a pain to use. I also really don't get what they're going for. If you want to provide users with a minimal desktop environment, why the ugly, resource-wasting window animations? If you want a more robust desktop environment, why reinvent the wheel with a buggy, feature-lacking desktop environment, when there are more functional options already out there? As a side note, this does seem to be some company-wide theme. When I purchased the Raspberry PI 5, I got an official case and an official keyboard. Neither of them worked well. The case did a truly awful job at cooling and the keyboard was uncomfortable to use. Again, why reinvent the wheel? Who knows. But, it's apparently a trend. To be fair, I did give PIXEL a chance, but I quickly abandoned it in favor of using the Lite (64-bit) installer and installing XFCE. Xorg had an error and didn't start properly. I don't recall having this issue when doing the same installation for the PI 4B, but I might have selected slightly different packages. I found that installing the 'gldriver-test' package fixed the problem. I rebooted and it went quickly to lightdm, then into XFCE. I didn't have trouble at first, but then the mouse started flickering like crazy. No one online seemed to have an idea why this happened. Some suggested it was the mouse theme (same as on the PI 4B, and I had no issue there). Others suggested it was X causing the problems (again, the same as on the PI 4B, and I had no issues there). It was unusable in this state, so I began looking for other options. My first thought was MATE. I'd tried it ages ago when it first came out. It was a bit buggy at that point, so I stuck with XFCE. But, it's been adopted by a lot of distros and quite some time had passed, so I was hopeful. I did a fresh Lite (64-bit) install, added all the MATE packages (including the -extra and -extras packages), added lightdm, and the 'gldriver-test' package just to stop any issue before it occurred. I set up the GUI login through 'raspi-config' and rebooted. It was fast -- not just lightdm, but MATE. It ran smoothly with no mouse cursor issues. I tested the flatpak of Kodi and video played really well. I had to select options to not render windows when moving or resizing in XFCE on the PI 4B to avoid screen tearing, but whipping a window around on the screen barely tore when using MATE on the PI 5 (8GB RAM). The MATE team clearly put a lot of work into things, because the experience using it now was much better than my previous experience. The hardware compatibility is the real win here. I don't think I've ever bothered with "lite" installs before this. But, this distro has the best compatibility with Raspberry PI hardware (for the PI 5, half the distros I tried didn't even boot). That said, I really don't like being boxed in. So, while this setup works well, I don't think I'd ever get another piece of Raspberry PI hardware. Note: Check out the Pragmatic Linux tutorial for setting up XFCE on Raspberry PI for a general outline on how to use the Lite install with a different desktop environment. I found it really helpful. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 14 reader reviews of Raspberry Pi OS...