14 DAY TRIAL // Q4OS is a Linux distribution that uses the Trinity desktop environment and one of its features is that it looks and imitates Windows-based on operating systems. Its developers have now released a new version of their operating system for Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi2 devices.
The Q4OS distro works just like pretty much any other operating system and it was only built for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, but its makers have decided to give the ARM platform a chance. This particular type of processors has become quite used and powerful. It's a little bit harder to compile the packages for ARM, but it can be done.
There are a number of limitations when dealing with ARM hardware and not everything that you would expect to work will be present, but users should have access to pretty much everything. Some stuff like Flash, for example, won't be available, and there are a few other packages that are not working with ARM hardware, but that's pretty rare.
Q4OS for the Raspberry Pi is here
The new Q4OS image for the Raspberry Pi devices is not considered stable and users have been invited to test them. Since both generations of the mini-PCs are supported, there should be a lot of takers out there.
"We announce the first Q4OS port for the ARM hardware, specifically for the Raspberry Pi / Pi2 series of single board computers. It is based on Raspbian distribution optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware. Q4OS is now one of the few distributions offering full desktop environment on the ARM architecture," wrote the developers.
It's also worth pointing out that some Q4OS features available on the regular desktop like the Desktop profiler, are not yet available. The Desktop profiler is a tool that allows users to change between specific layouts and themes for the OS.
You can download Q4OS for ARM from Softpedia and give it a try. Please keep in mind that it's only for ARM processors.