Raspberry Pi OS

The official, Raspberry Pi Foundation-maintained operating system for Raspberry Pi single-board computers, built on Debian and optimized specifically for that hardware family.

Embedded & IoTembeddedsingle-board-computerDebian-basedRaspberry-PieducationDownload ↗Official site ↗Docs / Wiki ↗

Based on

Debian

First released

2012

Package manager

APT (.deb)

Desktop environments

PIXEL (a customized LXDE/LXQt-based desktop)

Raspberry Pi OS (renamed from Raspbian) is developed directly by the Raspberry Pi Foundation as the reference, first-party operating system for its own hardware, with kernel and driver support tuned specifically for each Raspberry Pi model's particular GPU, camera interface, and GPIO pins. It ships a lightweight custom desktop (PIXEL) built on LXDE/LXQt foundations, along with the Foundation's own educational programming tools (Scratch, Thonny for Python) reflecting the Pi's origins as an education-focused device. Its official 'Raspberry Pi Imager' tool also makes flashing the OS (or dozens of other Pi-compatible distributions, including several others in this directory) to an SD card a simple, guided process rather than a manual command-line procedure.

MirrorNest doesn't mirror distro ISOs — installation media should always come straight from the project's own official download page (linked above), so you get the correct checksum/signature to verify against.