Raspberry Pi users will soon have a new OS to play with
Raspberry Pi users can now look forward to using a new operating system that should be available for the latest Pi devices in the last quarter of this year.
The previously unsupported Fedora operating system will now fully run on the Raspberry Pi 4, with approval granted by The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) in the first week of August 2022.
It should come as no surprise that Fedora 37 is yet another version of Linux, but the references extend far enough that it’s rumored to be Linux creator Linus Torvalds’ chosen distro.
Fedora OS for Raspberry Pi
According to Phoronix (opens in new tab)Official approval for Fedora 37 has been granted for the Raspberry Pi 4, the Raspberry Pi 400, and the Compute Model 4. General availability is expected to begin in October 2022.
Fedora Workstation (one of three versions) is intended for use on the Raspberry Pi 4, which uses the familiar GNOME desktop environment. Graphics drivers, OpenGL drivers, and GPU certification for Vulkan are all behind this decision.
Fedora’s Wiki (opens in new tab) summarizes: “Work on Raspberry Pi 4 has been going on for a number of years, but we never officially supported it due to a lack of accelerated graphics and other key features. With Fedora 37, Raspberry Pi 4 is now officially supported, including accelerated graphics using the V3D GPU.”
It continues: “Support for the Raspberry Pi ecosystem has been an ongoing evolution. The purpose of this change is to support the Raspberry Pi 4 including the 4B, the 400 and the CM4 with IO board.”
With more Linux distributions destined for the Raspberry Pi, Windows and macOS machines may soon face greater threats than they previously anticipated.