Firstly we installed Libreoffice, weighing in at 275MB it installed quickly and when we launched the Writer application it opened in less than 15 seconds and was very usable with no lag experienced.
Mine was a little more work because I also loaded Intel Realsense 2 for Python as well on the Pi, compiling that from source as well.
Other than that, I've learned that while AI taking over the world mainly makes for very entertaining stories, with only a few afternoons of careful assistance, it is presently able to take over a sizable proportion of my desk.
Fedora is competent and provides a good user experience and could quite easily be used as desktop distro for general purpose work.
This turned out to be more difficult than I expected, and the main goal of this article is to share the process I followed and save some of you a little frustration.
Compiling the other examples is less straightforward, but due to our initial setup, we can expect some success.
Raspbian has improved since it was first released in 2012 and with each new release we see more refinements added to it, no wonder the majority of projects around the world are based upon this distro.
Fedora handled our hardware quite well, we used the official Raspberry Pi Wifi dongle to connect to the Internet and it required no extra configuration steps, unlike Ubuntu which required a hack of the wpa_supplicants.
This will enable you to always be able to connect to your local IP address from the outside even if your local IP address changes (over here in Germany, every private DSL ip address changes every 24 hours).
Ubuntu MATE can be downloaded via the Raspberry Pi Foundation downloads page and copied to your SD card using dd or another image writing tool.
This extension pack will give you USB2 and USB3 so that you can access some devices that require them.
You need to prepare the SD card to be able to run Raspbian on the Raspberry: this excellent tutorial from Adafruit will explain the necessary steps.
While it could be used for common PC applications, what makes it exciting for home server enthusiasts is the possibility of using it as a compact media player to play even 1080p videos.
Both of these distros have enjoyed a long and prominent history in the Linux community and their entrance to the Raspberry Pi community is something to get excited about.
It's not limited to what we explain in this article now; it will follow any development in software so that you will be able to install updated software and more modules any time later.