Elementary OS lands on the Raspberry Pi

The world is getting armed and dangerous, as another distro joins the Raspberry Pi army.

- Andrew Gale

We get the feeling that people like the Raspberry Pi, because the latest distribution to offer direct support for the tiny computer is Elementary OS, as revealed in a blog post back in December 2020. After all the work it had put into making Elementary OS available for the Arm-based Pinebook Pro it’s decided it wouldn’t be such a leap as to offer experimental builds for the Arm-based Raspberry Pi 4 boards.

The dev team is pretty open about performance levels, what you can expect and what doesn’t work. It recommends a Pi 4 with a minimum 4GB of memory, but ideally the 8GB model. It also recommends sticking to a 1080p resolution alongside running the Pi 4 with a cooling solution–see Les Pounder’s excellent cooler guide in LXF257.

As you might have expected, one main sticking point is the lack of GPU acceleration from the GTK3 toolkit. There’s also no support for pre Pi 4 models, because it requires a 64-bit CPU and the additional memory requirements over the older 1GB limit.

Find out more at https://blog.elementary. io/elementary-os-on-raspberry-pi.

The lovely Elementary OS powered by the Pi. CREDIT: Cassidy James Blaede, CC BY-SA 4.0