Raspberry Pi Desktop is Back

10 years after it first offered its Desktop OS for PCs and Mac, Raspberry Pi is back with a new release of Raspberry Pi Desktop, its first update in four years.

So what took so long?

“People really liked using the Raspberry Pi Desktop on non-Raspberry Pi computers, but the trouble is that we make our money from selling Raspberry Pi computers,” Raspberry Pi’s Simon Long explains. “We’ve never charged for the software that makes them work. So it was hard to justify spending too much time maintaining the PC version, and the engineering team here has a lot of stuff to do.”

Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac has been updated with Debian Trixie. It’s now fully 64-bit, so it now longer comes in a 32-bit version, but it should still work on most PCs made in the past 15 years and older, Intel-based Macs. So there’s no version for Apple Silicon-based Macs, not yet, though Raspberry Pi hints that could happen eventually.

It’s fully up-to-date with the latest desktop release on Raspberry Pi devices, so it includes new interfaces like the Dock and Control Center. And there’s a new Raspberry Pi Connect client for controlling a PC or Mac running Raspberry Pi Desktop from a Raspberry Pi device.

You can download the new Raspberry Pi Desktop from the Raspberry Pi website in ISO form, flash it to a USB drive, and boot your PC or Mac with it to install it. You can run it live from the USB drive, persisting settings changes or not as desired, as well. And yes, it’s still free.