Raspberry Pi PIXEL desktop is now available for your Windows PC

It was a couple of days ago the founder of Raspberry Pi, Eben Upton, released a version of the graphical front end “PIXEL” that can be installed directly on PCs and Macs.

For readers unfamiliar with the name, PIXEL stands for “Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight” and is a desktop operating software that can be used by anyone with a Raspberry Pi. Of course, now the necessity to own the device for using  PIXEL has been taken out of the equation. Talk about an early Christmas present!

The announcement was made in a blog post in which Eben Upton revealed that they’ve ported an early prototype of the Raspberry Pi’s PIXEL desktop experience. So now, Linux lovers around the globe can have the sumptuous Pixel desktop experience natively on their regular laptops. The Pi Foundation also mentioned that the release aids its plan to produce the “best” desktop computing experience.

”If we like Pixel so much, why ask people to buy Raspberry Pi hardware in order to run it?”  said the Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton “There is a massive installed base of PC and Mac hardware out there, which can run x86 Debian just fine.”

Moreover, Eben stated that the software is also designed to assist students, as many of them use the palm-sized Pi in class or for their own projects but have to pick up their work on PCs or Macs.

“There is no learning curve, and no need to tweak… schoolwork to run on two subtly different operating systems,” he said.

On a side note, the OS can be used to restore an old computer to its prime because PIXEL is suited best to running on older PCs that are too slow to run modern operating systems. Another plus: PIXEL comes bundled with an office suite, a browser, educational games and programming tools that you would find on Pi but exclude Minecraft and Wolfram Mathematica due to licensing reasons.

“We don’t just want to create the best desktop environment for the Raspberry Pi: we want to create the best desktop environment, period,” said Upton.

How to get PIXEL:

As a requirement to run PIXEL, you’ll need at least 512MB of RAM, which shouldn’t be much of a problem as any PC built in the last decade or so should have it. You can download Pixel directly from the Foundation’s website and burn it to a DVD or USB drive.

Note: You’ll need to set your PC’s BIOS to boot from your chosen media before looking to the internal storage drive.

Another Note: You will probably need a USB with massive storage space to allow for a partition to save data and files. It’ll also give you a mini-PC that you can run separately from your machine’s primary OS.