I ended up breaking my previous Raspberry Pi install so I’m planning on reformatting the disk for my Raspberry Pi. I would consider myself a linux and Raspberry Pi novice and so would like help figuring out what to use for the iso.
The hardware I have is a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB with a 32 GB SD drive as well as a SENSE HAT and a second additional piece of hardware to connect to GPIO that I don’t know what it does. I plan to use the Pi for self-hosting a vaultwarden instance, set up Wireguard and have Home Assistant and would like to eventually deploy it with a Barcode scanner for a home food inventory system. As well as possibly additional projects.
If you were not planning on using the GPIO, I would recommend Alpine Linux. The aarch64 community repo has both Docker and Podman, whichever you prefer to use. There are guides on how to set Portainer on it.
If you are going to mess with GPIO and add stuff to it, your only safe bet is to use the RPI OS 64bit, preferably if you can the lite / headless version and use via SSH and admin it via something else, like cockpit and portainer for the docker stuff. Unfortunately, the RPi ecosystem is very tied to the drivers that the RPi foundation is delivering. Using a mainline kernel is ok if you don’t plan to use accessories though.
I think it’s very unlikely that I need to mess with GPIO since even the guides I can find for doing barcode readers normally with the Pi mostly use USB barcode readers.
I don’t think the 32 bit OS can address 8GB of RAM, so if you want/need to use all of the RAM then that should rule out all of the 32 bit OS options. I haven’t used the 64 bit version of Pi OS, but the 32 bit version, as well as their Pi for Desktop x86 32 bit OS are both excellent. I was new to Linux the first time I tried what was then called Raspbian, and loved the desktop. I’ve been a huge LXDE/LXQt fan ever since, and their modified version of LXDE is rather easy to work with.
Another aspect that makes the Pi OS more attractive is the community. It’s certainly possible to be successful running other distro’s, but sometimes you don’t want to spend a week reinventing the wheel and 3 weeks troubleshooting. It is much easier to follow in the footsteps of others and the Pi OS tends to be the default. You can certainly find (often outdated) videos of people using a different OS to get things done, but if they don’t have a large community to help you it may be a dead-end waste of time. It might be worthwhile to search for an official forum, Discord, or similar and see if it is active before investing a lot of time in any OS.
That’s not to say you should never try new things, but there is more than one reason Pi OS is the go-to OS for the Pi. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is geared towards teaching, and it is a great place for people new to Linux. It’s much more comfortable for a Linux veteran to use an OS more familiar to them. Without the comfort or knowledge they posses, your experience is going to be quite different and usually frustrating, so it makes sense to learn a bit in an environment that is easier for you to work in and maintain. Once you understand the types of things Linux users argue over through experience, you can then make more informed decisions and migrate elsewhere if desired.
Out of curiosity, I just took a quick glace and saw something interesting. I recently tried MX Linux Fluxbox edition on my laptop and have enjoyed it a great deal. I just looked and apparently they have a respin for the Pi, though sadly it is only available in a 32 bit version at this time. My point isn’t to sell you on this OS, but it would be a worthwhile investment to get a second SD card or other drive to boot from so you can explore, and when you grow tired of that you can go back to Pi OS. In the future it may flip around where you use the Pi OS less. You may also want to make backups if you invest any significant time modifying an OS so you don’t have to start from scratch in the future.
Okay that’s good to know, I’ve downloaded Home Assistant OS for now, part of it is just that I had found that it seemed to have extensions and add ons for everything I was trying to do but I will definitely remember Pi OS and MX Linux Fluxbox in the future.
Yeah Pi OS I definitely feel like was a better experience especially when I first used it in fall 2020 then my January 2020 experience with Fedora. Though from trying out Fedora more recently I feel that a big contributor to not enjoying Fedora there was everything we were doing was command line without really a proper explanation and using a CLI based text editor that I really didn’t get. With Pi OS my only issue I had with it was caused by Python and even then for 2020 and for the start of my final year project when we were using Python I was using the Pi because the dependencies and versions of Python were working better on the Pi than on my Windows desktop.