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.
Well it is also because Pi uses ARM processors. They still need devicetree blobs to function. As long as there is not a good functioning ARM EFI that is commonly used we have that issue. The thing is, when the Pi came around not every distro wanted to do a custom build for their hardware. Now a few distro’s do, but it is still a custom build for the Pi’s. If there would exist a commonly used EFI for ARM we could build a more universal ARM build of distro’s that could work on the Pi 5 with a Broadcomm and the same build could work on a Qualcomm.
Ofcourse processing power of the first Pi’s also is something we should think about regarding distro’s not wanting to do a custom build; But for the future it would be really nice to have an open source EFI we could compile for a SOC so it could run a standardized ARM distro.
“devicetree blobs” – they need blobs, DT is open source, always has been, it is just config file, also special bootloader, as Broadcom chips in RPI boots in weird way when first it boots the video core and than the arm core and you need firmware for the video core which is not open source.
If you want “clean ARM” than there are multiple choices for example Allwinner A64 – thanks to major community effort it runs mainline kernel without any blobs, the only non open source thing would be BL1 but it is tiny and most likely just slightly modified ARM version ( https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware/tree/master/bl1 ) – it has to be binary as it is in ROM of the chip.
There ale plenty of boards with A64 – for example https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A64/A64-OLinuXino/open-source-hardware – fully open source including kicad design files
Both major desktop environments are going to drop X11 support, though. Cool, right?
Isn’t XLibre the future?