Radxa OS
Radxa provides its own customized version of Debian 12 Linux (Bookworm). The distro is called Radxa OS and runs KDE Plasma with X.Org. I definitely prefer KDE to XFCE which is often provided with single board computers provided that the computer has sufficient RAM. My Rock 5T has 8GB of RAM so that’s sufficient.
The Radxa team has also developed Rsetup, a system configuration tool that’s designed to simply operations. By default, the machine boots into KDE Plasma. Over the past couple of years I’ve moved more of my systems over to this desktop environment if only because, unlike GNOME, it has excellent support for fractional scaling. Here’s an image of the desktop.
There are a variety of apps already installed such as VSCodium, Gwenview, Okular, both Firefox ESR and Chromium web browsers (and Konqueror), as well as various KDE apps. For video there’s Dragon Planer and for music JuK. Neither of these multimedia apps meet my needs, but it’s straightforward to install additional apps from the repositories. There’s no office suite pre-installed but LibreOffice is available. I’m still waiting for ONLYOFFICE to be available for ARM.
The system is well configured although some of the default settings aren’t to my liking. For example, the board is set to automatically sleep after 15 minutes.
Next page: Page 3 – First Login
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – Radxa OS
Page 3 – First Login
Page 4 – Interrogation of the system