Ubuntu 24.04 on the Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Desktop

© Lead Image © Svetlana Gucalo, 123RF.com

© Lead Image © Svetlana Gucalo, 123RF.com

Article from Issue 295/2025
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Not just for PCs, Ubuntu 24.04 supports the Raspberry Pi, bringing a fully-fledged Gnome system to the single-board computer. You can even run x86 apps in an emulator on the Pi 5.

Today's single-board computers, such as the Raspberry Pi, are so powerful that they can be used for both special applications and – in many cases – to replace a desktop PC. The processor's compute power is the least of the problems; instead, the actual issue is whether this small but mighty computer is compatible with your software.

Linux users who are used to working with free and open source software can build the applications they need from the source code if in doubt, but it makes life so much easier if you have access to ported versions of complete Linux distributions. Several fully-fledged distributions are available for the popular Raspberry Pi. You can choose between the official Raspberry Pi OS (which is based on Debian), Manjaro Linux, Arch Linux, and openSUSE Leap – this list is not exhaustive. But there is only one classic PC Linux distribution that has found its way into the official Raspberry Pi installer, and that's Ubuntu (Figure 1).

In this article, I put Ubuntu 24.04 through its paces on a Raspberry Pi 5 and test a useful feature that lets you run x86 and x86_64 applications on the ARM-based Pi 5, thus increasing the range of available applications.

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