Raspberry Pi Desktop proves old PCs aren't past it

One of the most frequently asked questions of Linux folks is "what's the best lightweight distro for an old PC?" The Reg FOSS desk's current answer is Raspberry Pi Desktop.

A couple of weeks ago, we covered the news of a Trixie update for the Raspberry Pi Desktop. Since then, we've been putting it through its paces on a couple of the oldest, slowest machines in the FOSS desk stables. It has performed splendidly.

If you fancy dipping a tentative toe into Linux, but you only have a relatively old low-spec PC spare to try it on, this is ideal. This is a modern OS: it's a 2.6 GB download, and it uses about 8 GB of disk space when installed. It will be a bit too much for a 25-year-old PC that was intended for Windows XP, but if you have an old PC from the Windows Vista era to hand, that should do.

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The splash screen calls it "PiOS 6.3," just as on Arm-based Raspberry Pi hardware. Here, though, we're testing Raspberry Pi Desktop: the x86-64 PC edition of the Debian-based system, available at the bottom of the downloads page.

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Back in 2023, the PiOS got a new Debian 12-based version, which included a new Wayland-based desktop – although it still looked almost identical to the old environment, based on X11, Openbox, and LXDE. Sadly, the PC version didn't get upgraded. Two years later – so, almost exactly a year ago – we got a Debian 13-based PiOS 6. The PC version still didn't get upgraded.

Now the PC edition has finally caught up with Debian 13. It's very similar to September's PiOS 6.3 release, complete with the option of a dock instead of a taskbar. Like the Arm version, you can use the raspi-config tool to switch between the Wayland-based labwc compositor and  X.org if you prefer.

There is one important difference: Raspberry Pi OS still offers 32-bit and 64-bit Arm editions, but Raspberry Pi Desktop is now x86-64 only, following Debian 13's retirement of its x86-32 edition. The Arm editions now use kernel 6.18, but the PC version is still on Debian's default kernel 6.12.

It brings the Pi's streamlined Debian desktop to PCs, with an installer that asks few technical questions. You can do a custom installation into existing partitions if you want, but you can just click "OK" a few times and it will do almost everything for you automatically. Unlike Debian itself, there are no questions about what to download, which desktop, network installation, or anything like that. One size fits all.

You get a custom desktop with a broadly Windows 95-style layout, except that the taskbar is at the top of the screen (you can move it if you want).  You get a basic collection of preinstalled apps: Chromium, Firefox, a text editor, and some helpful documentation – albeit aimed at owners of real Pi hardware. At idle, it runs in a little under 450 MB of memory, and if you switch to X.org, Openbox uses about 50 MB less. The lightest variant of Ubuntu is generally agreed to be Lubuntu, but PiOS takes about half as much memory as Lubuntu 26.04 did in our testing.

We tried it on a ThinkPad X200s, released in 2008. Ours has been upgraded with 8 GB of RAM, plus a spare 128 GB SATA SSD, but it's on the original 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo SL9400 and Intel GMA4500 integrated GPU. Everything we tested worked, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, USB 2, volume control buttons, brightness keys, and an external screen on DisplayPort. It automatically picked up and added our network printer, and happily connected to both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi networks.

For something even older and lower end, we went back to the year Vista was released: 2007. We transplanted the SSD into a ThinkPad X61 Tablet from that same year. Our very battered X61 has 2 GB of DDR2 RAM. PiOS handled that fine – with the sole exception of the touchscreen, which didn't work. (We've only ever got that working with Windows XP.)

In a 19-year-old PC with an SSD, PiOS booted in under half a minute, and it was able to run Firefox and Chromium and go online. Pages rendered slowly, but it worked. On the better-specced X200s, with four times the RAM, even the web experience was tolerable, if you're patient. We also tried it on a high-end machine from 2008, a Thinkpad W500, complete with AMD GPU. On that, it feels positively snappy.

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In our testing, PiOS takes as little memory as Alpine with Xfce – but it's far easier to install. Because it's Debian, it was also much easier to get additional apps such as both text-mode and GUI WordPerfect for Linux working. With Wine 11 from WineHQ, Microsoft Office 97 installed and ran superbly too.

If you're willing to trade a tiny bit of security for visibly better performance, the tweaks we gave in 2022 still work well.

PiOS is about as frugal as ChromeOS Flex, but you don't need a Google account or any other cloud login, and you get all-you-can-eat local apps. Compared to middleweight distros such as Linux Mint Xfce, Linux Lite, MX Linux, or Lubuntu, PiOS is significantly less demanding of hardware resources.

There are even lighter-weight Linuxes out there. For example, there is a Debian 13 version of antiX Linux, but although smaller, it has an overwhelming collection of kernels, init systems, window managers, and file managers. AntiX is not beginner-friendly. In 2024, we looked at Tiny Core Linux 15, which is far smaller. Now up to version 17.1, it remains a specialist tool: you'll need serious tech skills to add extra apps, let alone update.

Alpine is capable, versatile, and lightweight, but assembling a desktop requires considerably more work. If you take the time to learn your way around it, Alpine can be configured to use even less disk and memory than PiOS, but Alpine has a smaller selection of software than Debian – unless you add Flatpak, which negates Alpine's lightweight, clean simplicity. Experienced Debian or Devuan users could build something leaner, but Raspberry Pi Desktop saves them the trouble. Its team has had 14 years of practice in diet Debian.

The Raspberry Pi Desktop also supports Intel Mac hardware, and it's ideal for old-but-working Macs now long-unsupported by macOS. It could also suit older Intel MacBooks whose RAM can't be expanded, although Wi-Fi, graphics, and other hardware support will depend on the model. A 4 GB MacBook Air may still have useful life running current browsers and LibreOffice. Just possibly not at the same time.

This should be your go-to option for an old, low-spec PC. It won't make a 15-year-old computer as fast as a new one. But it can make a 15-year-old PC useful again, with current, supported apps and tools. Once you get familiar with PiOS on a low-end x86 machine, it will also work fine on newer and more capable hardware. ®