Part of it depends on exactly what you are planning to do. In terms of general code development, running Debian or Ubuntu on your PC will give you a fully supported Linux environment which is highly compatible with Raspberry Pi OS (not binary compatible, but provides the same general development environment and packages). Raspberry Pi OS is essentially Debian with some RPi-specific packages added to it and a default configuration which is more suited to the RPi. Ubuntu is Debian, but polished into a more commercial product (aimed at both free enthusiast users and big business or "Enterprise" use). Skills and development work are very easily transferrable between Debian, Ubuntu, and RasPiOS. The major difference with RasPiOS is for GPIO programming (the 40 pin IO header on RPi boards), and RasPiOS has a special lightweight desktop environment to improve performance on RPi. Debian will be closer to RasPiOS than Ubuntu, particularly for package versioning, but they are all quite similar in general. Taking code developed on Debian or Ubunti across to RasPiOS should generally be easy, it's the reverse which can be more tricky, if your code uses some of the RPi-specific stuff it's not going to be so easy to take it from RPi to PC.
There is also a slightly outdated Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC, which gives you a native x86 32-bit build of RasPiOS on PC. It's a few years old now, based on Debian 11 (bullseye), whereas the latest for RPi hardware is based on Debian 12 (bookworm).
There is also a slightly outdated Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC, which gives you a native x86 32-bit build of RasPiOS on PC. It's a few years old now, based on Debian 11 (bullseye), whereas the latest for RPi hardware is based on Debian 12 (bookworm).
Statistics: Posted by Murph9000 — Thu Feb 06, 2025 4:06 am