Its now officially publicly released
Has there been any plan to release pi-topOS 64bit? Is it possible to DIY based on the Pi OS? What’s exactly the difference between Pi OS and pi-topOS?
there has been talks of it in the past but @pi-topMIKE has commented that they are waiting for an official release before they think of working on support, prior to an official release the 64bit was rather buggy for quite some time and there will still be bugs, but mass adoption will squash them.
In my vocabulary, nothing is impossible, do you mean run Raspberry Pi OS on the pitop and have the hardware working? if so, yes, 32 bit version only at this time is supported
pi-top OS is basically Raspberry Pi OS but modified to work with the pi-top hardware and it has their own theme and preinstalled software.
Its basically to have an easy level of install option for the pi-top OS for those that just want a plug and play option. Its also the easy way to diagnose issues with the hardware as well, a fresh install of Pi-top OS will always let you know if something messed up or there is a hardware fault. well it does not have a pop up telling you but you will know if you try something on a fresh install and if it works where your other install it does not.
Raspberry Pi OS 64Bit official release is huge, it will get people adopting the 64bit operating system and it should become standard in the future, especially for raspberry pi’s that have RAM 4GB or more. sure you can use all of the RAM but over multiple apps. but all the RAM address space cannot be used in 1 application setting. you get 3.2GB RAM max.
Another reason why 64Bit is huge is that there are alot of ARM64 software already that do not support ARM 32bit at all and some software are heavilly optimized for 64bit and is very sluggish on 32bit. There has also been noticible stability improvements on the RPi 4 4GB and 8GB using the 64bit OS but due to lack of support from 3rd party developers, software support was the major drawback.
Now the 64bit OS is no perfect, for example if you need to use WidevineDRM (for watching netflix, amazon video, etc) you have to downgrade chromium to 32bit to do so till there is 64bit support which may not take too long to be honest. other issues is hardware driver support, pi-top is an example, its known that there is no 64bit support for thier drivers because there was no support for 64 bit OS’s and the reason is simple, no point in supporting something that we have no idea if or when there will be a release. Now we do and i cant wait for the pi-top team to release a 64 bit OS
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