x86 Raspberry Pi Desktop is a great way to revive an old PC

theregister.com

24 points·lproven··6 comments

Or you can use Debian and XFCE.

Fortunately Debian hasn't abandoned 32-bit.

Yes, true. But this a custom config of Debian, and it plainly says Debian all over the installer, and the GRUB menu, and in other places.

It is Debian but smaller, lighter, easier to install and pre-configured with useful stuff.

Um. It is Debian.

This is a preconfigured build of Debian Bullseye, with LXDE, with some drastic trimming and cutting to keep the memory footprint small, preconfigured with a nice desktop layout and a bunch of apps.

I assessed it up against Debian and Devuan on the same hardware; RasPi OS uses about half the RAM of plain vanilla Devuan with Xfce Even installing Xfce onto RasPi OS results in it using about 150MB more RAM.

Raspbian is shady, they silently put a microsoft repo overnight, making fleets of raspberry devices ping and give telemetry to microsoft without your consent! including installing their GPG key!

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lbu0t1/microsoft_rep...

AIUI this happens to everyone using VSCode on Linux.

VSCode is one of the most popular editors around now:

https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/news/252496...

It's Microsoft's fault, not Raspbian or the RasPi Foundation. Everyone loves VSCode for some reason. So RPF provided it.

You don't get anything much for free from Microsoft without strings attached.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com