Has anybody any experience of running (vanilla) Debian on Raspberry Pi 4 in stead Raspberry Pi os ?
Yes, I ran Debian on a Pi in the house for over a year, it’s not different from Debian on an x86 box, aside from drivers etc.
You can install Docker as well and run a set of containers on it, I did that. Home Assistant, Pi Hole etc, pretty straight forward.
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Thanks for the response. I had chosen Ubuntu in the past, primarily for it’s 64-bit support on the RPi 4. Raspberry Pi OS did not had a stable 64-bits version at the time (I run kubernetes on 3 RPi’s 4 with 4GB ram).
I am reinstalling them now with a new os (just for testing/education) , but I cannot find a valid reason to choose a vanilla debian over raspberry os (lite), since raspberry os also supports 64 bits.
For desktop use, you are able to choose a different desktop, so that can be a valid reason. For server I cannot think of one.
Maybe you know one ?
I don’t know of any reason that you need to change, I just am more familiar with the full distro, and I have the 8GB of RAM version, so it’s less of a concern.
I have migrated my workloads to a retired laptop running Ubuntu, with Docker and even a VM. Even though this laptop is older, it’s a lot faster than the Pi and has 16GB of RAM, so I’m loaning the Pi out for now.
In the long run, I think that I’ll get one of the sub $200 mini PCs that are also a lot faster than the Pi when it’s time to retire the laptop for good.
I have a kubernetes cluster of 3 Pi’s. and I have a couple using for other stuff. I bought them when they were fairly cheap. I use them for testing and other homelab projects, so powerconsumption was for more important than processing power.
For mini pc’s I can recommend the ones from Minisforum. I using them on a daily basis are affordable and from good quality.
I run Debian in rpi-4’s as well.