Raspbian versus Debian SID armhf

patrick295767 · 09-02-2017, 06:49 AM

Hello,

I have a running Raspberry PI III with Debian armhf sid. I have a good custom kernel which is working. It was very easy to install. Debian sid armhf looks pretty awesome, fast and so on. Debian is working very well.

I wondered if it is better to use Debian or Raspbian. I have a lot of trust for last Debian developments (sid and experimental).

https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi
It says that Raspbian would be more adapted.

Quote:

Instead the official Debian Squeeze image issued by the Raspberry Pi foundation was based on debian armel which uses software floating point and the “soft float” ABI. The foundation found it necessary to use the existing Debian port for less capable ARM devices due to time and resource constraints during development of the Raspberry Pi. Therefore, it does not use of the Pi’s processor’s floating point hardware – reducing the Pi’s performance during floating point intensive applications – or the advanced instructions of the ARMv6 CPU.

I have the impression that Debian is much faster than Raspbian on my machine. I have not investigated (yet).

Is Debian still a good advice for Raspberry III ?

Thank you and best regards

jens · 09-02-2017, 09:28 AM

I'm using Debian sid/... armhf on a Pi as well.

One thing that should be mentioned, it does require kernel customization.
I guess most people just use Rasbian because it's the most used one with more users, more howtos and basically less hassle (including out of the box non-free GPU acceleration, needed to boot your Pi).

patrick295767 · 09-06-2017, 04:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jens

I'm using Debian sid/... armhf on a Pi as well.

One thing that should be mentioned, it does require kernel customization.
I guess most people just use Rasbian because it's the most used one with more users, more howtos and basically less hassle (including out of the box non-free GPU acceleration, needed to boot your Pi).

Kernel compilation yeah. I prefer also a real Debian for the PI, rather than just using Raspbian.