Re: Raspberry Pi Imager with Other OS
You're using a lot of words to simply object to me calling the Raspberry Pi OS GUI "cut down". It's based on a modified LXDE, the latter of which is specifically designed for low RAM usage. This was selected in order to run adequately on a 1GB Pi.
I made no mention of Xfce, Budgie, MATE, or KDE, because I haven't tried any of those on a Raspberry Pi. I can't speak about Xfce as I'm not as familiar with it, but Budgie, MATE, or KDE are not designed for low RAM usage so I don't know why you would think I was even referring to them by implication. They are all relatively similar to Gnome in terms of features and size.
If you like any of those better than Gnome, then that's fine. The point which was being made is that if anyone is using an 8GB Pi (I haven't tried a 4GB model), then there is no technical reason why an OS which uses Gnome can't be on the list of options. The Pi seems to have the horsepower to run it just fine.
Someone else will have to speak with respect to Xfce, Budgie, MATE, or KDE, because I haven't tried any of them on my Raspberry Pi hardware. Someone else again will have to speak with respect to the 4GB models, as I don't have one and so haven't tested them.
My previous comments have been based on my experience running Ubuntu on a Pi4. I recently acquired a Pi5. After my previous post on this subject I was inspired to install Ubuntu 23.10 on a spare SD card (using the Raspberry Pi imager) and try it in the Pi5. It ran fine, with good graphics performance running the standard Ubuntu version of Gnome.
I also tried playing a Youtube video on full screen (1920 x 1080) and it ran just fine, with no glitches or visible dropped frames.
To reiterate my point, whatever Linux OS you decide to run, the Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM will likely have more than enough CPU and GPU performance to run nearly any mainstream Linux distro which has a Raspberry Pi ARM version, and it will be indistinguishable from running it on an x86 PC.