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by nathan_f77 3465 days ago
This will be an interesting one to watch. There's a huge number of tiny Linux distros, but most of them couldn't compete with something released by the Raspberry Pi foundation.

I think their biggest competitor is lubuntu. It's just a stripped down Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop. PIXEL also uses LXDE, and it looks like they've made a few design tweaks to the file manager. They both have Chromium as the default browser. Right now I think lubuntu supports way more machines.

I'm wondering why they didn't just use lubuntu, or just fork it and make a few changes. I've been using lubuntu on a small media PC, and I've been very happy with it.
3 comments
Narishma 3465 days ago
> I'm wondering why they didn't just use lubuntu

Ubuntu is compiled for ARMv7, so it doesn't run on the RPi 1 and 0.

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em3rgent0rdr 3465 days ago
> "I'm wondering why they didn't just use lubuntu"

They could of, and that might have been a great idea. Although not as headline grabby as "we made a new OS!". I think that Debian probably is slightly better on PIs simply because Raspian has been running off Debian from just after the first Pi's came out, and since Debian historically supported more architectures, so maybe makes more sense from stability standpoint to build off of Debian instead of Ubuntu. I recall the creators of Raspbian saying it was actually quite difficult as it was to port Debian to RPi 1 due to the particular architecture, so starting from Lubuntu might have been a little too difficult.

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khedoros1 3465 days ago
Ubuntu dropped ARMv6 a long while ago and refuses to consider bringing it back, so it was out of the running as a Raspberry Pi OS, back when just the Pi1 was around.

Ubuntu will run just fine on the Pi2 and 3, just not on the 1 or 0. Pixel is a mildly-tweaked version of LXDE running on Raspbian, which is a mildly-tweaked version of Debian. That's problematic, when part of their brand is providing a good environment for learning (which is helped by keeping the OS as similar as possible between different versions of the hardware).

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Fuzzwah 3465 days ago
I use lubuntu on my daily drive laptop and older PCs I have laying around. I'm a huge fan.

I wanted to note that with the up coming 17.04 release it will be using the LXQt desktop environment.

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