Comments on: Alternative Raspberry PI OS list https://peppe8o.com/raspberry-pi-os-list/ Raspberry PI, Arduino and Electronics made simple Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:07:58 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Cyclical Obsessive https://peppe8o.com/raspberry-pi-os-list/#comment-76806 Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:07:58 +0000 https://peppe8o.com/?p=1941#comment-76806 The post comparing PiOs Lite to PiOs Desktop led here, but does not answer the same question. My interest is comparing PiOs Lite compared to Ubuntu server, but more specifically than 99% of your audience I am interested in performance running ROS 2, which I first ran on the Pi5 in Docker because Ubuntu for the Pi5 was not available. Later I rebuilt my Pi5 robot on Ubuntu, primarily to minimize update maintenance and simplify sensor configuration, but I did not take the time to assess performance for both configurations.

Yesterday a fellow announced he had built ROS 2 native on PiOS Trixie Desktop. While I was disappointed with the ROS 2 visualization running on my Pi5 robots, the Raspberry Pi 5 seems to be able to just barely handle what I ask of it with ROS 2 over Ubuntu server. (Stating NAV2 sometimes crashed due to 140% load, but not always.)

My robots have been powered by Raspberry Pi for 8 years, and every year a new OS, or new Pi, or new ROS configuration or change of all three. Up until recently, none of my robots ever saw more than 80% load, but I feel that with ROS or LLMs (with a MCP manager) my Pi 5 may have finally hit the performance/power wall. (My oldest Pi3 robot gets 8 hours playtime on a charge, while my newest Pi5 robot only gets 1-2 hours on a battery twice the capacity. I always want my bots to be fully autonomous so performance/ power is the decider.)

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