Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users and developers of hardware and software for Raspberry Pi. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Now I have a pretty decent understanding of which operating systems can be installed on the Raspberry Pi. But what I'm wondering is, as far as quality of GUI vs. performance vs. hardware compatibility etc..
What operating system would be the best choice for a long term install?
I not 100% sure what I will use my Raspberry Pi for, but mainly tinkering and learning purposes I think. I may do a little work in Python.
I'm a relatively new user of Arch, but have been using Linux - mainly Debian and its derivatives - for a few years now. I would highly recommend Arch, for someone who wants to tinker and learn - Debian is too easy...
Arch gives you a basic working system, with a package manager. What more do you need? It doesn't even ship with Vim! You can choose exactly what you want and will always have the latest versions.
Furthermore, whilst hard float support is awesome in it, Raspbian is full of bloatware. I don't like raspi-config, nor the fact it ships with code examples, which - as far as I know - aren't under package management, and therefore, cannot be easily removed and replaced if necessary. Arch will also have hard float support soon.
The only warning I have is that Arch's python package is Python 3, not Python 2. Furthermore, using the latest packages all the time, may introduce security problems if used on an external facing box, but shouldn't be a problem on the Raspberry Pi.
For a long-term OS installation, I would recommend using the Raspbian Linux Distribution, which officially recommended by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. This distribution has the added advantage of having tens of thousands of pre-existing packages, and is based off of Debian, which is one of the most popular (and stable) Linux distributions.
Finally, Raspbian has "out-of-the-box" Python 2 support (and actually includes various demo applications/games), as well as an optional window manager.
