Raspberry Pi OS

Raspberry Pi OS
Raspberry Pi OS 12 (Bookworm) running its default desktop environment
Developer	Raspberry Pi Holdings
OS family	Unix-like
Working state	Current
Source model	Open-source
Initial release	15 July 2012; 12 years ago (2012-07-15)
Latest release	2025-05-13 / 13 May 2025[1]
Available in	23 languages[2]
List of languages Chinese Czech Danish Dutch English Finnish French German Greek Hungarian Italian Japanese Korean Norwegian Bokmål Polish Portuguese Russian Slovak Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian
Update method	Command-line via package manager Optional graphical app stores
Package manager	APT, dpkg
Platforms	Raspberry Pi (32-bit): armhf Raspberry Pi (64-bit): aarch64
Kernel type	Monolithic (Linux)
Userland	GNU
Influenced	Twister OS
Influenced by	Debian
Default user interface	labwc (Wayland-based)
License	Free and open-source software licenses (mainly GPL)
Official website	raspberrypi.com/software/

Raspberry Pi OS is a Unix-like operating system developed for the Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers. Based on Debian, a Linux distribution, it is maintained by Raspberry Pi Holdings and optimized for Raspberry Pi hardware, with low memory requirements and a choice of 32-bit or 64-bit architectures. The 64-bit version is built directly from Debian for the arm64 platform, while the 32-bit version is derived from Raspbian, a customized Debian variant created in 2012 for the original Raspberry Pi.^[3][4]

The operating system is compatible with all models except the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller. It is available in several configurations: a standard edition, a "Lite" version without a desktop environment, and a "Full" version that includes additional software such as LibreOffice and Wolfram Mathematica. The operating system can be downloaded and installed using the Raspberry Pi Imager utility, or purchased preloaded on a microSD card.