Four years after its last release, Raspberry Pi Desktop is back on Debian 13 Trixie with a 64-bit build, the new dock and Control Centre, and a Raspberry Pi Connect client — and it's still free.

Some software gets quietly abandoned. Raspberry Pi Desktop got something stranger: it was never officially killed, just left frozen on Debian 11 Bullseye for four years while users kept emailing to ask when the new one was coming — two or three messages a week, according to developer Simon Long. This week the answer finally arrived: a fully rebuilt Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac on Debian 13 "Trixie", 64-bit only.

What Came Back

The origin story is charming. Back in 2016, Long finished his first pass at turning LXDE into Raspberry Pi's desktop, and CEO Eben Upton walked past his desk and asked, "wouldn't it be cool if I could run this on my Mac?" A few weekends later, Long had the whole Pi desktop booting on a Mac from a USB stick. That side quest became an installable Debian plus Raspberry Pi Desktop for PCs in 2017 — and it turned out to be far more popular than anyone expected.

The reason it stalled is refreshingly honest. Raspberry Pi makes its money selling computers, not software — "we've never charged for the software that makes them work," Long writes — so maintaining a free PC desktop was always a hard sell against everything else the engineering team had to do. They managed updates for Debian Buster and Bullseye, then simply ran out of runway.

What's actually new this time:

  • Debian 13 Trixie base, fully 64-bit (amd64). Debian dropped 32-bit support for PC architectures, and the Pi Desktop followed. Most PCs from the last 15 years and Intel-based Macs are fine; Apple Silicon Macs are not, since Debian support for those is still experimental.
  • The modern Pi desktop experience. The new dock and Control Centre are in, matching the latest Raspberry Pi OS on actual Pi hardware.
  • A Raspberry Pi Connect client built in. You can remote-control a PC or Mac running the desktop the same way you control a Pi — screen sharing and a remote terminal from the Connect website. One difference: PCs identify by a device name you type during setup, where a Pi is identified by its hardware ID.
  • Still free, as it always was.

The Hardware-Revival Playbook

Here's where this gets practical. That drawer of old laptops — the one with the 2015 machine that wheezes under Windows and chokes on a heavyweight desktop — just got its best candidate in years. Raspberry Pi Desktop was designed to run on a $35 computer; on a decade-old laptop, it flies.

The workflow is low-risk by design:

  1. Download the ISO from raspberrypi.com and flash it to a USB stick.
  2. Boot and choose "run with persistence." The live session saves your changes back to the stick, so you can do a real trial — Wi-Fi, the dock, your actual workflow — not a five-minute screenshot tour. Hate it? Choose "reset persistence" and the stick is back to a clean image.
  3. Install for real via Calamares — either the desktop shortcut or System Tools → Install Raspberry Pi OS in the main menu — onto the internal drive or SSD.

The target audience writes itself: classrooms, kiosks, relatives' ancient laptops, and anyone who wants one consistent desktop across their Pis and their PCs. And Connect turns those revived machines into remotely manageable endpoints — install it on grandma's laptop, then help her from your browser.

One honest caveat: this is a desktop for the patient. The four-year gap happened once; nobody guarantees it won't happen again. But for the price (zero) and the effort (a USB stick), it's the easiest hardware revival you'll do this month.

Sources: "Raspberry Pi Desktop now available for PC and Mac", Simon Long, Raspberry Pi — https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-desktop-now-available-for-pc-and-mac/