Pi Desktop

The Orange Pi 5B, as it should have shipped.

A clean, fast, self-healing Linux desktop for the Orange Pi 5B (RK3588) — built by someone who bought the board expecting a real computer, and got tired of waiting for one.

What it is

• 🖥️ 4K@120 / high-refresh, flicker-free — a custom-tuned kernel that does the VOP2/dclk work most images skip
• 🎬 Hardware video decode — including in the browser — 4K60 YouTube runs on the RK3588's video engine, not the CPU (~118% instead of 600%+). mpv and VLC are wired to the VPU via rkmpp too. Decode runs on the Panfrost stack, so it costs no stability tradeoff. (AV1 is software-only — see KNOWN-ISSUES.)
• 🔵 Bluetooth that fixes itself — the AP6275P radio bug that's broken these boards for years, root-caused and auto-healed
• 🔌 Boots with your USB audio interface plugged in — U-Boot probed USB before storage, so a bus-powered interface could stall the board before it ever reached the kernel. Fixed in v1.0
• 🎛️ A curated desktop — hardware-accelerated Chromium, VLC & mpv, LibreOffice, VSCodium, WiiM Play for the hi-fi. Nothing you didn't ask for
• 🚫 No snaps. No telemetry. No junk drawer. De-snapped, de-Canonical'd
• 🔒 Upgrade-proof — kernel, bootloader, and snap-free state held, so apt upgrade can't undo the work

🔵 Self-healing Bluetooth — the fix Rockchip-land never shipped

The AP6275P WiFi/BT combo chip has broken Bluetooth on these boards for years: dead at boot with WiFi active, stuttering audio, a toggle that needed a full reboot to recover. Pi Desktop ships the root-caused fixes and a background service that resurrects the adapter in ~10 seconds, automatically — no reboot. Toggle it off and on, count to ten, it's back. The thing that demanded a reboot for nine years now heals itself while you're not looking. (Fixes published upstream: see issue #1.)

Honest scope

A niche distro, single maintainer, on the vendor 6.1 BSP kernel. It ships a KNOWN-ISSUES file on purpose — we'd rather tell you what's rough than let you find out. One excellent browser ships (HW-accelerated Chromium); a second browser or mail client is your choice, and we provide the guides (Widevine, etc.). Release notes say what a release doesn't fix, too.

Download

v1.0 — "Vanilla Sky" — Releases. Flash the .img.xz to microSD or eMMC, verify the SHA256, boot. First boot expands to fill the card.

Installing to eMMC? Read EMMC-INSTALL.md first. Copying a root filesystem onto eMMC does not install a bootloader — you can end up running a new OS on years-old firmware, which causes crashes and reboots under load (and follows you across distros). The guide covers the correct install, how to wipe a factory-Android eMMC, and maskrom recovery.

The family

• Pi Studio — the audio-production sibling (Sonic Pi, Ardour, an offline NPU AI music copilot)
• Naked Network Pi — the stripped, headless base both are built on (coming)

Built on Joshua Riek's ubuntu-rockchip · Ubuntu 24.04 LTS · GPL-3.0 · by defcom5-rockchip