SARPi is the name of the sub-project that produces the ARM port of the Slackware distro. We’ll also be leaving out RiscOS, which despite being an excellent OS, isn’t Linux and might be unfamiliar to many of our younger readers. Unfortunately the project has lost steam over the course and isn’t yet available for the Pi 2. The one omission we regret is Pidora, the Fedora flavored distro for the Pi. Instead of specialized builds, we’re on the lookout for a distro that lets us use the Pi as a general purpose desktop and extends all the benefits we’d expect from a regular desktop Linux distribution. Since its release some months back, distros that target the Pi have been working hard to put out Pi 2-ready versions of their wares that take advantage of the extended hardware on the device.We already know that this will be the first Pi that’ll be supported by official releases from both Microsoft and Canonical, although their releases might not be what you expect So in this group test we’ll take stock of the available distro options.

Among other things, this change means that you can’t use distros designed for the original Pi on the new Pi 2 straight out of the box. However, the new Raspberry Pi 2 uses a processor based on a different ARM architecture than the original Pi. With a quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM, the new version has the right kind of components and physical resources to outpace some full-sized desktops produced in the last decade or so. But with the shiny new Raspberry Pi 2, the device for the hobbyist has broken into the mainstream. Thanks to desktop distributions optimized for the Pi, in particular Raspbian, you could also use the Pi as an underpowered desktop.

The original Raspberry Pi struck a chord with anyone who wanted a tiny little device that had enough juice for a specialized task. Since you can now use the Raspberry Pi 2 as an everyday desktop, Mayank Sharma needs a distro that fits the fill.

Ventoy raspberry pi