7 Operating Systems You Can Run With Raspberry Pi

Linux

Three different flavours of Linux are available officially: Pidora (based on Fedora); Archlinux (a DIY OS); and Raspian (Debian).

Raspian is the recommended OS for everyone new to the Raspberry Pi, but if you fancy trying out some of the others too, a new tool from the creators of Raspberry Pi has been released which allows you to choose from a selection of images during boot-up (including some of the others on this list).

OpenElec & XBMC

OpenElec is a slimmed down and optimized OS specifically made for running XBox Media Centre. Unlike Raspbmc, OpenElec doesn’t contain anything other than the bare minimum, so it’s more difficult to install other packages, for instance. Consequently, the selection of add-ons available is much smaller (no emulators, gasp!) – but it does offer better performance.

RetroPie

RetroPie is a universal emulator, which means it can pretty much play any ROM you throw at it, although Playstation games don’t work so well (that is kind of pushing the Pi, don’t you think?). Technically built on Raspian, but this comes as a prebuilt OS image you can download.

RISC OS

A nice 1080p GUI awaits you in this retro environment specifically built for the ARM , by the team who designed the original ARM processor. Though it might seem unfamiliar to you, RISC was actually commonplace in British schools in the early 90s.

Firefox OS

Not quite the sleek new phone UI you’ve been seeing, but a combination of Firefox and PTXdist-built Linux. It’s very much a work in progress, and doesn’t actually support any input devices yet – so purely used as a public information terminal. 

Plan 9

Do you like being tortured? Then you’ll love Plan 9 from Bell Labs, a barebones open-source unix-like OS with primitive GUI that fully supports UTF8 filenames (I know, exciting stuff). It was designed by the same people who created the original UNIX, so that must mean it’s good.

Android 4.0 is coming

Those of you looking to play with Android on Pi in advance of our source code release might want to check out the community Razdroid project, which last month produced its first non-accelerated port of Gingerbread on top of the publicly released VideoCore binary.