We’re really sorry you had to wait so long…
Here, at last, is the fully updated Debian Trixie with Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac. Download it from our website now to give your other computers a Raspberry Pi makeover. We’ve even included a Raspberry Pi Connect client.
Back in 2016, I’d just finished the initial set of changes to make the default LXDE desktop into something Raspberry Pi-specific. (I’d wanted to call it PIXEL, an acronym for Pi XWindows Environment Lightweight I’d come up with a couple of years earlier, but a certain other tech company had claimed the word by then, so it was sadly not to be…). As I was fiddling with it, our CEO Eben Upton walked past my desk and suggested, “wouldn’t it be cool if I could run this on my Mac…?”
Side quest
A couple of weekends later, I was a bit bored at home, and, knowing that it was possible to boot a Mac into Debian, I wondered just how hard it could be to add our desktop to a stock Debian image. A few hours later, I was sitting there with my Mac booted from a USB stick, with the Raspberry Pi desktop running pretty much in its entirety. On Monday, I wandered over to Eben carrying my MacBook and said, “you might want to see this…”
So I’d proved it was possible, but there is a long way to go from a hacked-together weekend experiment to something that you can actually let people use. As a sort of ‘Skunk Works’ project, Serge (the engineer responsible for, amongst other things, packaging and creating the Raspberry Pi OS images) and I spent some time over the course of the next few months making something a bit more usable. That Christmas, we gave away a bootable DVD with the PC and Mac version of the Desktop on the front cover of The MagPi Magazine, as Raspberry Pi Official Magazine was called then.
We were, I have to say, a bit taken aback by the reception – it was far more popular than I’d ever dreamed it might be. That DVD was just a bootable live image, but in 2017, after a lot more work by Serge, we released the first installable version of Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac, and that seemed to be even more popular.
The only problem was that we had created a bit of a rod for our own backs. People really liked using the Raspberry Pi Desktop on non-Raspberry Pi computers – but the trouble is that we make our money from selling Raspberry Pi computers; we’ve never charged for the software that makes them work. So it was hard to justify spending too much time maintaining the PC version, and the engineering team here has a lot of stuff to do!
High demand
We managed to find the time to update the Desktop for the Buster and Bullseye releases of Debian, but then we all just got too busy with other things, and, while we left the Bullseye version on the website for anyone who wanted it, we simply didn’t have time to release any newer versions. But people kept on asking for it – we get two or three emails every week asking when the PC Desktop will be updated, and we haven’t had an answer, because we honestly didn’t know when we might get a chance to do it. We’ve continually tried to allocate time to be able to work on this, but it hasn’t been easy.
Until now.
Earlier this year, we (or rather Serge) finally got the latest version of the Desktop running on top of a Debian Trixie image. It’s now based on 64-bit Debian (the amd64 architecture) rather than the older 32-bit version, as Debian itself has stopped supporting 32-bit for PC architectures. This shouldn’t be a major problem – most PCs made in the last 15 years or so will quite happily run the 64-bit version of Debian, as will most Intel-based Macs. (Debian support for Apple Silicon is still experimental, so unfortunately those of you with the latest and greatest shiny fruit products will not be able to run this.)
Raspberry Pi Connect compatible
The new Raspberry Pi Desktop is fully up to date with all the latest desktop changes, such as the Control Centre and the new dock. In addition, we have added the Raspberry Pi Connect client, so you can control a PC or Mac running the Desktop along with your Raspberry Pis running Raspberry Pi Connect. It works in exactly the same way as on a Raspberry Pi; the only difference is that when you set up a PC for Connect, you will be asked to enter a name with which to identify that device – this isn’t required on a Raspberry Pi, where a unique hardware ID is used instead. The name you choose will then appear in the list of devices you see when you log into the Connect website, and you will be able to use screen sharing or a remote terminal on the device.
How to get it
Raspberry Pi Desktop is supplied as a downloadable live Debian image: flash the .iso file to a USB stick, insert it into your computer, and boot from the USB. When prompted, choose “run with persistence” – this means that any changes you make will be saved back to that USB stick. The same menu also gives the option to reset persistence; if you choose this, any changes will be deleted and your USB stick will be back to a clean original image.
Once booted to Raspberry Pi Desktop, you can also choose to install it on your computer’s own hard drive or SSD: you can run the standard Debian installer, Calamares, from either the desktop shortcut or the Install Raspberry Pi OS entry in the System Tools category of the main menu.
The PC and Mac version of Raspberry Pi Desktop is available right now from our website. I hope you enjoy it – and as I said at the start, we’re really sorry about the wait!