Raspberry pi OS questions

[Pretzel]

Hello,

I just received a new fangled raspberry pi with a SD card with NOOBS on it. This means I have the option of choosing operating systems, and me being bad at this went here for help. I would like to know if i should go for the traditional raspian or archlinux, or if there is something better. What should I  go with?

[ShadowCaptain]

Depends what you want to do, and which os you prefer

 

There is no right answer

[manikyath]

i suggest raspbian, it contains all you need to do what you want on the pi, as well as being the "official" os for it.

 

that said, theres some "roms" for specific purposes like retropie that may work better for you.

[Pretzel]

Just now, ShadowCaptain said:

Depends what you want to do, and which os you prefer

 

There is no right answer

Honestly I think I'm going to go with archlinux because raspian looks really shitty. I am also not doing that much on the OS other than small games like undertale and internet things

[manikyath]

2 hours ago, Pretzel said:

Honestly I think I'm going to go with archlinux because raspian looks really shitty. I am also not doing that much on the OS other than small games like undertale and internet things

raspbian is the best looking you'll be able to go on the pi, its not a powerful platform.

that said, it comes with lxde by default, which is quite customizable in the looks department without much extra overhead.

[MEC-777]

3 hours ago, Pretzel said:

Honestly I think I'm going to go with archlinux because raspian looks really shitty. I am also not doing that much on the OS other than small games like undertale and internet things

Doesn't really matter what it looks like, as long as it gets the job done. Especially on a device like this that doesn't have the ample CPU/GPU horsepower to support fancy GUI's. 

 

I bought a Pi v2B not too long ago and went with raspbian (at least for now and to learn more about the platform first). It looks decent enough and works fairly well. I suggest installing the chromium browser as the default one in raspbian is horrible. lol. Just don't open more than a few tabs at once. 1GB of ram isn't much.

[elkenrod]

5 hours ago, Pretzel said:

Honestly I think I'm going to go with archlinux because raspian looks really shitty.

Ubuntu Mate looks real good on Pi, and runs about as well as Raspian.

 

Also, Berryboot > Noobs.  You get a wider range of OS options; Kali, Ubuntu, Kodi, etc

[Guest]

I'd like to point out they have the new raspbian minimal. It's like normal raspbian but you have to install a display server, a DE and all that jazz yourself.

[Azgoth 2]

Raspbian is the best choice if you don't have some really specific purpose in mind that another distro exists to do.  E.g.: if you want to use it as a home theatre system, use XBMC.  If you want to do a lot of retro gaming and have a really sweet emulator setup, use PiPlay or something like that.  If you want a general-purpose OS, Raspbian is the best bet, since it's designed by the Raspberry Pi people for the specific hardware, is very well-supported, runs very well (considering the inherent hardware limitations), and has a lot of software available.  Some of the other distros like Arch aren't always as stable on the Pi, and can be lacking in support (I don't know about Arch specifically--just using it as an example).

[JUJUJU655624667]

On 2/4/2016 at 7:05 AM, Pretzel said:

Honestly I think I'm going to go with archlinux because raspian looks really shitty. I am also not doing that much on the OS other than small games like undertale and internet things

HA! Good luck configuring Arch in under 4 hours. I would personally use raspian, as it can take full advantage of your Rasperry Pi.