I spent some time playing with my Raspberry Pi’s this weekend. I took advantage of my new home internet to downloaded more recent OS’s and set up some on micro-SD cards. I have a Pi 2 that I want to make either a backup server or a file server / NAS-like device. I installed Raspberry OS Lite (basically the server version) on a card for it, though I didn’t get around to setting it up. I have a Pi 4 that is running Retro Pie (video game emulation), but it was kind of a non-official release. I installed the official 4.7 release, but didn’t get around to setting it up. I will have to copy all the games and saves from the old version. I also set up a desktop version of Raspberry OS on the 4 and played with it a little. I’m considering trying it out for some casual web browsing, some web dev, and other general computing uses. I’m wondering if it’s capable enough to become my primary, or maybe semi-primary computer, the latter being more reasonable if I get a good NAS system setup.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation now has first party Raspberry Pi Imager software for installing OS’s onto cards. It makes it very easy. It allows selecting from a list of pre-chosen OS’s, then choosing the card, and then press button, and it will wipe the card, auto-download the OS, and install it. Unfortunately, it seems like it will only save a copy of the most recent downloaded OS and doesn’t allow (easily) keeping more for later use, which isn’t very data usage friendly. So I manually downloaded the OS images from the website and then used the bottom OS option of using a custom image.