One of the biggest advantages of the Raspberry Pi boards lies in the fact that you can use inexpensive microSD cards to switch between different operating systems at will. Combine that with the massive number of Raspberry Pi distros, and you can easily convert your tiny SBC into your distro-hopping companion.

That said, the Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu, and a couple of specific-purpose distros are often the operating systems most users choose when building cool projects. So, here’s a list of all the Raspberry Pi distros that don’t get the attention they deserve.

5 OctoPrint

A Raspberry Pi-flavored 3D printing hub

If you’re a fan of DIY projects, you may already use a 3D printer to bring your 2D CAD sculpts and designs to life as 3D models. That said, managing the workflows of your 3D printers can turn into a painful ordeal, especially when your PC setup and printers lie in different rooms.

Thankfully, you can slice away most of the tediousness of 3D printing by flashing OctoPrint on your Raspberry Pi. Besides granting you control over every aspect of your 3D printer, OctoPrint boasts a ton of useful features, including temperature monitoring, an embedded camera feed, and the ability to capture time-lapse recordings of your projects. Heck, you can enhance this neat operating system’s utility using hundreds of OctoPrint plugins.

4 Alpine Linux

The ultralight alternative to DietPi

Although the desktop variants of Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu, and other classical distros provide an accessible UI for beginners, they can be quite taxing on your underpowered SBC. Not to mention, their resource-hogging nature makes them ineffective for complex projects such as running Docker containers, setting up emulators, hosting websites, or even a mixture of all three!

As such, DietPi is a popular distro for power users, though you can cut down the CPU, memory, and disk consumption even further with Alpine Linux. Often used in the home lab space when setting up complex Kubernetes clusters, the lightweight Alpine Linux is just as useful for Raspberry Pi owners who want to minimize their resource overhead and squeeze every last ounce of performance out of their SBC.

3 moOde Audio

Volumio is also worth mentioning

Docker enthusiasts may already be aware of Navidrome, a useful tool that lets you host your entire library on top of your Raspberry Pi. But for audiophiles who want to build an all-in-one music streaming platform out of their Raspberry Pi, moOde Audio is hands-down the best option.

In addition to its sleek UI and solid equalizer features, moOde is also compatible with Spotify and AirPlay. It also lets you stream music from your NAS shares, and you can fine-tune every aspect of the audio playback using CamillaDSP.

2 FydeOS

Chromium OS on your Raspberry Pi

ChromeOS and its clones serve as decent distros for light users whose primary workloads involve Google’s collection of online apps. If you’re the proud owner of one of the newer Raspberry Pi boards, you can install FydeOS to get the ChromeOS/Chromium OS experience on your SBC.

Having used multiple Raspberry Pi distros, I find the FydeOS UI stands out from the rest with minimalist yet highly responsive UI. In fact, FydeOS is more optimized than the GUI variant of the Raspberry Pi OS, and you can even get Android apps running on the OS thanks to its Android Subsystem functionality.

1 UmbrelOS

Just ignore the crypto apps, and you’re in for a good time

Docker containers are great for hosting cool services on underpowered devices. But when you’re in the early stages of your home lab journey, you might have a hard time setting up Docker on your Raspberry Pi.

Thankfully, UmbrelOS can remove a lot of complexity from containerization by providing an easy way to deploy services using its built-in app store. From running your own e-book server using Calibre Web to configuring a WireGuard VPN, UmbrelOS has a huge library of supported containers. Once you’ve grown accustomed to the apps, you can even try deploying your own Docker containers with the help of the Portrainer package.

Which Raspberry Pi distro are you fond of?

If your tinkerer's heart still isn’t satisfied, we’ve got a couple of other recommendations. Despite the Raspberry Pi SBCs lacking enough firepower and ports to function as a full-fledged NAS, it’s possible to spin up a makeshift storage server with the help of OpenMediaVault. Meanwhile, Gladys Assistant is a great alternative to Home Assistant if you’re tired of running the latter and prefer a more attractive interface. There’s also TwisterOS, which includes multiple themes to make the UI mimic that of Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, and other distros, with the caveat being that the OS hasn’t been updated in a long time.