Raspberry Pi boards are no longer constrained – these days, you can get a quad-core board with 8 or 16GB of RAM to go around, equip it with a heatsink, and get a decently comfortable shop/desk/kitchen computer with GPIOs, cameras, speedy networking, maybe even NVMe, and all the wireless you’d expect.
Raspberry OS, however, remains lightweight with its pre-installed LXDE environment – and, in many cases, it feels quite constrained. In case you ever idly wondered about giving your speedy Pi a better UI, [Luc]/[lucstechblog] wants to remind you that setting up KDE on your Raspberry OS install is dead simple and requires only about a dozen commandline steps.
[Luc] walks you through these dozen steps, from installation to switching the default DE, and the few hangups you might expect after the switch; if you want to free up some disk space afterwards, [Luc] shows how to get rid of the original LXDE packages. Got the latest Trixie-based Pi OS? There’s an update post detailing the few necessary changes, as well as talking about others’ experiences with the switch.
All in all, [Luc] demonstrates that KDE will have a fair bit of graphical and UX advantages, while operating only a little slower, and if you weren’t really using your powerful Pi to the fullest, it’s a worthwhile visual and usability upgrade. For the regular desktop users, KDE has recently released their own distro, and our own [Jenny] has taken a look at it.
OK, this is obviously engagement farming. I mean, the discussion which desktop environment to use is discussed with an almost religious devotion and is only topped by the fanatical discussions caused by the heretics that prefer emacs over vim ;)
I don’t really see any advantage of KDE over most other DE described in the article, maybe the unified configuration panel, that one is indeed nice. The icons in the task bar, the desktop switcher that is available in e.g. LXDE and many others, heck even in XFCE (which I really don’t like). And installing KDE in Debian could really easily be done just by selecting the appropriate “task” – the easiest way to do this is admittedly by using aptitude (don’t get me started on that tool). You don’t even have to reboot the machine, you are not updating the kernel.
It’s because Raspberry Pi OS sucks, GNOME sucks, and KDE is just better.
The reason Raspberry Pi OS had to exist was because the hardware was so anaemic. The Pi 5 is quite a capable device, so there’s no need to use their bargain basement OS anymore.