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Raspbian is a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware. It is officially provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation as the primary OS for the Raspberry Pi family of compact single-board computers. Raspbian comes pre-installed with a wide range of software that is tailored for education, programming, and general use. It includes programming tools designed to help beginners and experts alike develop software on the Raspberry Pi platform. With a user-friendly interface and a custom set of utilities and applications, Raspbian aims to provide a rich user experience while making the most of the Raspberry Pi's hardware capabilities, from its lower-end models to the more powerful versions.
Raspberry Pi OS is a Unix-like operating system developed for the Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers. Based on Debian, a Linux distribution, it is maintained by Raspberry Pi Holdings and optimized for Raspberry Pi hardware, with low memory requirements and a choice of 32-bit or 64-bit architectures. The 64-bit version is built directly from Debian for the arm64 platform, while the 32-bit version is derived from Raspbian, a customized Debian variant created in 2012 for the original Raspberry Pi.
The operating system is compatible with all models except the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller. It is available in several configurations: a standard edition, a "Lite" version without a desktop environment, and a "Full" version that includes additional software such as LibreOffice and Wolfram Mathematica. The operating system can be downloaded and installed using the Raspberry Pi Imager utility, or purchased preloaded on a microSD card.