What's wrong with RaspberryPiOS? It's just Debian with Raspberry Pi utils/firmware installed AFAIK
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Oh nothing wrong with it at all, didn't mean it like that. Just wanted recommendations outside of the ordinary 😅
Armbian.
why
It comes ready for daily usage "out of the box".
I would recommend Debian for Raspberry Pi.
I run a bunch of services off mine and it’s been rock solid, and I assume I get upstream security fixes quicker than I would if I were using one of the Debian derivatives.
The same goes for Ubuntu. The aarch64 architecture is supported just like x86-64 and everything works great.
Ubuntu releases an official RPI image, and Ubuntu Server is a major contender for any serious production server work.
Obviously that's not the right answer for the OP (who specifically says that they want to try something more "off the beaten track"), but it's a solid recommendation in general.
Sure, Ubuntu is just another derivative of Debian
Debian is the easiest and most flexible
NixOS runs on a pi quite well and it's pretty good for setting up self hosted services
Storage space might be an issue on smaller SDs but I haven't run into that yet on mine
Yeah I really do want to get into NixOS, just not had the time to learn something so different quitr yet. Possibly after Christmas. Would really like to be running the same OS on all of my devices fro sure.
I am running alarm / Arch Linux ARM aarch64 on mine for years already. Just make sure to use the linux-rpi
kernel and use rpi4-eeprom
for bootloader updates as these are not installed by default.
I'm currently running Alpine on my RPi4 as a host for some Dockers, including pi-hole and it works great! The setup is surprisingly painless and you'll end up with some insanely fast boot time. Highly recommended !
Alpine. It’s crazy fast and you can run everything in Docker.
It may be a bit minimal for your taste, but I wholeheartedly recommend Alpine. I'm currently running AdGuard and opentracker on a RaspberryPi 1B with Alpine edge, and the experience has been rock solid.
Thanks but not yet, eventually yes, just to see how it is and learn, but for now still learning the basics.
I'm running OpenSUSE on my pi4, but that's just preference as I like all my machines on the same OS