In a rather curious turn, the Raspberry Pi foundation has released an x86 PC port of its PIXEL+Debian Linux desktop environment.
PIXEL (which is a clunky backronym for Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight) is an extensively modified version of the LXDE X11 desktop environment. It was originally released in September for use with Raspberry Pi single-board computers, but now it has also been packaged up for x86 PCs. You can boot your Windows or Mac PC into the PIXEL desktop environment right now, if you so wish.
In the words of Eben Upton, founder of the foundation, PIXEL is "our best guess as to what the majority of users are looking for in a desktop environment [...] Put simply, it's the GNU/Linux we would want to use." To that end, PIXEL is both clean and modern-looking, but more importantly it is useful, with a wide range of productivity software and programming tools pre-installed. PIXEL doesn't eschew proprietary software, either; it even comes with the Adobe Flash browser plug-in.
Can any PIXEL users comment?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday December 25 2016, @09:38PM
How difficult would it be to connect the keyboard and screen though. Seems like I remember hearing that laptop keyboards tend to run on a non-standard stripped down USB bus.
I don't know about screens though. Do they commonly use a standard protocol? And is it something that you could feed directly from a RPi, or would you need an adapter board to convert from hdmi?