The Raspberry Pi Foundation has put a lot of work into their software stack. You need only look at a few of the Allwinnner-based Pi clones for the best evidence of this, but the Pi Foundation’s dedication to a clean and smooth software setup can also be found in Noobs, their support for the Pi Hardware, and to a more limited extent, their open source GPU driver offerings.
Now the Pi Foundation is doing something a bit weird. They’re offeringtheir default Raspberry Pi installation for the Mac and PC . Instead of Flashing an SD card, you can burn a DVD and try out the latest the Pi ecosystem has to offer.
A few months ago, PIXEL became default distribution for the Raspberry Pi . This very lightweight distribution is effectively the Knoppix of 2016 it doesn’t take up a lot of resources, it provides enough software to do basic productivity tasks, and it’s easy to use.
Now PIXEL is available as a live CD for anything that has i386 written somewhere under the hood. The PC/Mac distribution is the same as the Pi version; Minecraft and Wolfram Mathematica aren’t included due to licensing constraints. Other than that, this is the full Pi experience running on x86 hardware.
One feature that hasn’t been overlooked by a singular decade-old laptop in the Pi Foundation is Pixel’s ability to run on really old hardware. This is, after all,a lightweight distribution for the Raspberry Pi, so you shouldn’t be surprised to see this run on a Pentium II machine. This is great for a school in need of upgrading a lab, but the most interesting thing is that we now have a new standard in linux live CDs and Flash drives.