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Yeah, I always run Raspbian. It's stable and let's me largely forget about it.
This is probably a hot take, but:
I disagree. The OS doesn’t run a mainline kernel, and the Raspberry Pi devs recommend a clean slate on OS upgrades. Granted, they do some trickery for performance with their Zero (not 2) line, using armhf instead of the slower armel, but this doesn’t excuse the fact that Raspberry Pi OS is so brittle. The builds are also still on 32-bit, even though every Pi since 3B can run 64-bit OSes.
I just run Debian on mine. Can’t be assed to clean flash my devices each major update.
I kinda understood half of the things you said, but i run DietPi on mine.
It has 64-bit support, you can update the os without resetting everything, still based on the original kernels for the closed source optimizations, but removes all the clunky and slow parts, leaving a very lightweight and fast os.
Plus, for newbies (like me) it has a decent built-in installer for various software with minimal ulterior setup required.
It sounds like you’ve found your ideal distro. Great! Not everyone will have the same exact use case for their Pi’s.
I’m just a little disgruntled because I like treating my Pi’s as headless servers, often with a single purpose, and I don’t want to have to erase the SD cards to upgrade versions.
sounds like a dietpi usecase! (sorry for the shilling, i just really like the project)
but hey, if debian works don't touch it
The SOC also isn't fully open, so you won't get top tier performance with a purely FOSS stack. I push the limits on mine (Retropie mostly), so using their OS is the better bet (I use the one shipped by Retropie, which is super old).
I actually kinda hate the Raspberry Pi because of how closed it is. It's gotten a bit better over the years, but the Pi 5 took a big step back. But unfortunately, its competitors aren't much better, so I still use my RPis, but I probably won't buy more.
I'm also not a fan of Debian in general, so if I switched, I would probably use openSUSE or Arch instead (I tried Arch, but it had issues syncing to disk after updates; they fixed that, but it shows that other distros will be a bit wonky). Raspbian works, so I stick with it.
That’s very fair. Everyone has a different use for Pi’s, and I just happen to favor long-lived devices that can be updated easily. I wish more of the pi internals were upstreamed too.
My frustration with Raspberry Pi OS is that the packages available were constantly out of date. Some were 2 to 3 years out of date.
I eventually started using Alpine linux on my Pi boards and have been happy since then. Now I can use the latest Docker and Podman packages without manually adding new repositories.
If I didn't prefer Alpine's minimal approach, I would have probably gone with Debian because of it's history in stability.
I believe you may have found your ideal OS. Debian will always lag behind ever so often. And that’s okay. We all use the Pi’s for different reasons.
I can appreciate that about Debian. Common tools and stability can be both convinient and reliable. Learning linux is already overwhelming with choices.
Even though I use Alpine for all my Pi boards and laptop, I keep a live usb partition of Linux Mint Debian Edition as my emergency backup. It just works.
I went with Arch Linux on ARM for a minimal approach - did you try that?
Genuninely interested in your experience of Alpine Linux as I'd not considered it on a Pi (only VMs so far...)
I haven't tried arch at all. I used Linux Mint for a year, LMDE for a year and only really started working with command line since last December. I think I chose to try Alpine because I wanted my web facing devices to have the least amount of software installed. Security-wise it made sense to me to have less surface area to exploit.
It took a bit extra effort for me to learn how to use OpenRC as the init system. As well as learning Linux from a bare bones linux perspective.
I actually found using Busy-box Ash interesting to work with and that's the only shell I currently use. I even wrote a whole script around Rsync in a POSIX friendly way because I liked the idea portable scripting.
If you're interested, I can send you a link that contains the setup notes for my server. It's about 85% of my setup process, the rest being some files that are mostly customization that I rsync into place towards the end of the setup process. That can give you an idea of what Alpine on ARM is like.
Thanks. No need for the setup notes (but thanks for the kind offer), it was more about the experience, but I think you've already answered my question with less surface area (I do have 1 Pi that's internet facing for Radicale)
Have you looked at Ansible? That might also cover what you're trying to do.
How do you think Ansible can help me? I've read about it a few times but it's hard for me to understand it's actual usage without spending time playing with it.
I can possibly look into it a bit more in the future. I've got a few things I'm working on like learning how to do TLS with Caddy so I can reduce my dependency with Cloudflare.
Ansible is an automation tool to setup systems to a known desirable end state.
TBH, for a single device, it's overkill, but you seem like someone who keeps good notes and has some custom files to copy across.... you could convert your setup note into an Ansible file, and it will also copy over your custom config files.
For Ansible you define the desired outcome and it does "all" (kinda) the work for you... so... say you want Apache, MariaDB and PHP, it doesn't matter if half are installed already, or not, or their dependencies - you just say:
Do an update Install packages: A B C Copy my config files over Start the services Relax
Yep, it'll take 10 times as long to get it working up front, but the day you want to duplicate it / start on a fresh Pi / VM, it's all there for you.
I use it to setup all my Pi Zeros thr same way (they're doing BLE presence detection) and for their regular updates
I've also got some VMs setup that way
But... I tried it on a laptop and as it's a single device I just ended up setting it up manually and now the ansible script is woefully out of date... just some balanced feedback.
It's also 64 since 2 years I believe.
The devs have started releasing 64-bit builds since then, yes. However, they still push people to the 32-bit builds: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/
I understand their thinking. They want a unified build experience, to simplify their development and user experience.
Yeah, that's what I thought. Same.
Isnt Raspberry PIOS debian based?
Yup.
Sry morning brain fart. Read it's ubuntu based
It's Debian based: