Peter Gamma (Physiologist & Director) Meditation Research Institute Switzerland (MRIS)

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Which Raspberry Pi & which Pi OS to choose?

Posted bypg@petergamma.org 1 Comment on Which Raspberry Pi & which Pi OS to choose?

Last Updated on October 27, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

Dr. Syazwan AI from Malaysia uses LibreOffice on his Pi zero w, but can we use this device as a Desktop PC?

  • Dr. Syazwan AI says in the comments below that he uses now a Raspberry Pi zero 2 w for LibreOffice.
  • We tested this device as well but LibreOffice start up took 45 sec.

Also Mr. Sujano does not recommend the Pi zero 2 w as a desktop PC:

On the long-term it is eventually worth to optimize a zero 2 w for mobile use, since it uses little power. There are instructions for this available from Leepspvideo how to do this. But the device is not easy to optimize and we failed to do this on our first attempt. We where not able to install Pi apps on it and without an app store it is difficult to handle.

We also tested Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu desktop on a Raspberry Pi 4, but we personally had the best experience with a Raspberry Pi 4 with leepspvideo Linux setup part 4 64bit KDE Plasma which was at our first tests easier to use than Raspberry OS without KDE desktop, faster than Ubuntu and had some features of a Windows or Ubuntu desktop:

We think leepspvideo Linux setup part 4 64bit KDE Plasma is a great distro for the Pi 4, it is based on Raspberry Pi OS. But we still miss a Pi 4 from Leepspvideo for mobile applications which has a case which is a bit smaller than the one shown in the video above with the cluster case.

  • There are 82`678 posts in the Raspberry Pi forum about Rasperry Pi OS.
  • There are 6`425 posts about Ubuntu in the Raspberry Pi forum..
  • The number of posts about Raspberry Pi in the Ubuntu forum are not worth mentioning for us personally.

If we look at the Raspberry Pi imager download statistics of the last month:

Operating SystemPercentage
Raspberry Pi OS (other)37.19%
Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit)22.98%
Ubuntu8.85%
Home Assistant5.86%
Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit)4.77%

we can see that 65 % of the Raspberry Pi users downloaded Raspberry Pi OS, whereas 8.85% downloaded Ubuntu and 5.86% Home Assistant.