Best Operating System for Raspberry Pi beginner

If you already bought this awesome minicomputer you might be wondering which Operating System (OS) should be installed on it.There are may OSs available for  Raspberry Pi, you can download Linux, Windows, and Android raspberry pi compatible versions totally free.If you are new to Raspberry Pi, OS recommended is RASPBIAN STRETCH WITH DESKTOP(PIXEL).This works as an ordinary Desktop PC and equipped with many useful software packages.

GUI with customizable wallpaper

Main screen

This OS gives a real Desktop like  GUI environment with Tabs, Icons, and Dropdown menus.Wifi and LAN network settings can be configured from the GUI and start menu let you access other tools available.If you are not familiar with Linux at the beginning you may find it weird to see the Close, Minimize and Maximize in lefthand corner.

Libre Office package

LibreOffice is an open-source cross-platform office suite, serving as a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. It was forked from OpenOffice 3.3.0 and has gained ground in Linux distributions as the default office suite. It has replaced OpenOffice since Debian Wheezy and is available in Jessie-backports. It has good support for .doc, .xls, .odt, .ods and other popular formats.

Chromium browser

This is included recently and for Raspberry Pi Wheezy version and in the previous version Jessie this had to be installed manually.This Google masterpiece works well as a browser but opening many tabs may crash it.

Python IDLE

The easiest introduction to Python is through IDLE, a Python development environment. Open IDLE from the Desktop or applications menu: IDLE gives you a REPL (Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop) which is a prompt you can enter Python commands in to. As it's a REPL you even get the output of commands printed to the screen without using print.

Note two versions of Python are available: Python 2 and Python 3. Python 3 is the newest version and is recommended, however, Python 2 is available for legacy applications which do not support Python 3 yet.

VNC(VIRTUAL NETWORK COMPUTING) viewer

  Sometimes it is not convenient to work directly on the Raspberry Pi. Maybe you would like to work on it from another device by remote control.

VNC is a graphical desktop sharing system that allows you to remotely control the desktop interface of one computer (running VNC Server) from another computer or mobile device (running VNC Viewer). VNC Viewer transmits the keyboard and either mouse or touch events to VNC Server, and receives updates to the screen in return.

You will see the desktop of the Raspberry Pi inside a window on your computer or mobile device. You'll be able to control it as though you were working on the Raspberry Pi itself.

Wolfram Mathematica

Mathematica is a computational programming tool used in science, maths, computing and engineering. It was first released in 1988. It is proprietary software that you can use for free on the Raspberry Pi and comes bundled for free with Raspbian. Mathematica is generally used for coding projects at university level and above.

Node-Red

Node-RED is a drag-and-drop visual tool which comes pre-installed on Raspbian.is a powerful open source tool for building the Internet of Things (IoT) applications with the goal of simplifying the programming component.

It uses a visual programming that allows you to connect code blocks, known as nodes, together to perform a task.The nodes when wired together are called flows.

Java 7

Oracle Java 7 JDK is installed into Raspbian Wheezy repository. Oracle Java offers significant performance advantages over OpenJDK on ARM platforms, and will expand the range of Java applications that run well on the Pi.


These are just highlights.Raspberry Pi Wheezy offers many more tools and even games as Minecraft.In most of our Astronomy projects, we will be using Rasbian Wheezy.