Quickly wondering what people recommend as OS for a rpi model 4b, outside of the RaspPiOS ofc. I want to use the RPI for all networking related stuff (dont worry its not using an sd-card). So PiHole, and I’ll also want to use it as my exit-node out of my Tailnet. I will also run ProtonVPN on it so that all my devices indirectly use a vpn, as long as they’re connected over Tailscale. That’s at least what I had in mind so far, please do criticise the idea if there are better alternatives or solutions that you would recommend. I have been looking at running either Alpine or MicroOS. Or should I just go for a server based OS?
Appreciate any suggestions!
Dietpi
Dietpi is a nice little distro, especially when running it minimal without a GUI. Its added toolkits make farting around on the command line more comfortable
What’s wrong with RaspberryPiOS? It’s just Debian with Raspberry Pi utils/firmware installed AFAIK
Oh nothing wrong with it at all, didn’t mean it like that. Just wanted recommendations outside of the ordinary 😅
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.
Debian is the easiest and most flexible
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.
Sure, Ubuntu is just another derivative of Debian
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.
Armbian.
why
It comes ready for daily usage “out of the box”.
Go with MicroOS. SUSE’s products are criminally underrated for how well designed they are. Plus at some point you are bound to face a brick wall when trying to use software that is not musl compatible on alpine.
I use Fedora IoT on one of mine, for the immutable OS and container focus.
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 !
I am running alarm / Arch Linux ARM aarch64 on mine for years already. Just make sure to use the
linux-rpikernel and userpi4-eepromfor bootloader updates as these are not installed by default.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.
Try RISC OS first. It won’t do what you’re asking for, but it’s a super neat vintage OS!
Alpine. It’s crazy fast and you can run everything in Docker.
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
