Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac is Back
The Desktop That Refused to Die
In 2016, engineer Simon Long had just finished reshaping LXDE into something distinctly Raspberry Pi. He had wanted to call it PIXEL — Pi XWindows Environment Lightweight — but a certain other tech company had already claimed the word. As he sat tinkering with the result, CEO Eben Upton walked past his desk and asked a simple question: wouldn't it be cool if he could run this on his Mac? That question became a ten-year side project, and as of Tuesday, it finally has its most polished answer.
Long proved it was possible in a couple of weekends at home. Debian can boot on a Mac. Adding the Raspberry Pi desktop on top was not trivial, but it was not impossible either. By Monday morning he was carrying a MacBook running Raspberry Pi OS in its entirety to show Upton. From there, Long and engineer Serge spent months turning a hacked experiment into something releasable. The first version shipped on a bootable DVD tucked into the cover of The MagPi Magazine at Christmas 2016. The reception surprised everyone involved.
The 2017 installable release amplified that surprise. People genuinely wanted to run the Raspberry Pi environment on old hardware — not as a novelty, but as a practical operating system for machines that had aged out of mainstream Linux distributions. The utility was real. A five-year-old laptop that could no longer keep up with Ubuntu's system requirements could run Raspberry Pi Desktop just fine. That kind of second life is hard to walk away from.
The Maintenance Problem
But Raspberry Pi is a hardware company. The software that powers its computers has always been free. The PC and Mac version of that software generates no direct revenue and competes for engineering time against everything else the team builds — and that list is long.
They managed to update the Desktop for the Buster and Bullseye releases of Debian. Then the team got too busy and that was that. The Bullseye version stayed on the website as a courtesy download. In the years that followed, emails arrived at a rate of two or three a week asking when a newer version was coming. The honest answer, for a long time, was that no one knew. The team wanted to do it but could never find the window.
Until now.
Two or three emails every week, for years, asking the same question. When is the update coming? For a long time, Raspberry Pi had no answer to give.
What the New Version Delivers
The 2026 release is built on Debian Trixie, the current stable release, and it represents a meaningful technical step forward. The most significant change is the move to 64-bit. Raspberry Pi Desktop has dropped 32-bit x86 support, following Debian's phaseout of 32-bit PC installation images. The new image uses the amd64 architecture, which covers most hardware built in the last fifteen years or so without issue.
The one notable exclusion is Apple Silicon. Debian's support for M-series Macs remains experimental, which means the current Apple lineup — everything from the M1 onward — cannot run this release. Intel-based Macs are fully supported. If your Mac predates Apple's chip transition, you are in. If it doesn't, you are waiting on Debian's upstream progress.
For everyone else, the release comes with a welcome addition: a Raspberry Pi Connect client. The remote access tool, previously available only on Pi hardware, now runs on any PC or Mac running the Desktop. Set up your device, give it a name — unlike on a Pi, where a unique hardware ID handles that step automatically — and it appears in your Connect device list alongside your Pis. Screen sharing and remote terminal access work the same way across the board.
A Chromium browser running on Raspberry Pi Desktop on a Dell, being used to remotely control Raspberry Pi Desktop running on a MacBook. The team published the photo. They were aware of the irony.
How to Get It
The release ships as a downloadable ISO. Flash it to a USB stick, boot from it, and choose "run with persistence" at the menu — changes you make save back to the stick across sessions. It works cleanly as a live environment for evaluation or occasional use without touching your existing installation.
If you want it permanently installed, the Calamares installer handles that. It runs from a desktop shortcut or from the System Tools category in the main menu. Point it at your hard drive or SSD and it behaves like any standard Debian installation from there.
The Desktop is available now at raspberrypi.com. It is free. It always has been. That is, in part, why it took this long to get here — and also why the emails never stopped arriving.
Aaron Rose is a technology writer and publisher covering computing platforms, open-source software, and hardware ecosystems.