It reads like this article comes from a parallel universe, a parallel universe where they didn't know (Debian) Linux is able to boot on different architectures. Slap the desktop background on it, the DE customizations, and they're amazed?
> It reads like this article comes from a parallel universe
I think you do not understand what Raspbian/PiOS is and what it is for.
The Pi started out in 2012 as a real Linux computer for kids to play with Python, at a price of £25. (It's British.) It had 1 slow ARM core and 512MB of RAM.
Even in 2012 it was hard to run a graphical Linux desktop in 512MB RAM.
Debian ran very poorly, for 2 reasons.
1. It's big and bloated. Still is.
2. The Debian developers assumed any Arm v6 kit would not have a hardware FPU. So, Debian for Arm v6 only did software floating point. Even slower. The Pi had an FPU.
So Mike Thompson and Pete Green recompiled all of Debian. They make 2 global changes:
* Arm v6 binaries with FPU support, an arch called `hardfp`
* An extremely cut-down Debian desktop with an extremely cut-down LXDE desktop to run with room to spare in half a gig with only slow SD card available for swap.
And they wrapped that in a dead easy installer for kids which asks no difficult questions. It doesn't ask about netboot or which desktop or what optional components you want. It asks your name, and not much else.
And it gives a usable OS image that was a gig or so in size and used under 200MB of RAM when running X11.
That is what Raspbian was: a super tiny super simple build of Debian for this specific kit: Arm v6 binaries with hardware FPU compiled in, plus a fancy GPU, and very little RAM and slow storage.
It's been renamed PiOS but the same project continues. It's the single lightest least-fuss graphical desktop Debian there is. It uses 400 MB of RAM to run a totally custom full Wayland desktop, with hardware accelerated compositing, wifi and bluetooth and remote control, all in a 2.5GB installable image. And it is designed to be so simple it can be installed and used productively by a child of under 10.
And this OS today still runs on a 14 year old RasPi 1 from 2012.
There has been an x86 build for about 6 years. That's just been updated to Trixie. That is the story here.
Right next to me at this moment is a Thinkpad X61t from 2007 running this OS. It's full 64-bit Debian 13 over 2 screens, it's running in 2GB of DDR RAM, and right now with a terminal window I have 1.4GB of available RAM.
It would run on older but the only working older machine I have is x86-32 and Debian 13 is x86-64 only.
It is nothing to do with different architectures at all. That is as irrelevant as what colour the SD card is.
It runs in as little RAM as Alpine Linux but this is a full glibc system with systemd, and your kid can install it.
This is a modern FOSS OS that runs well on a 20 year old PC and will get someone online as easily as ChromeOS Flex, but with no need for any cloud account. It's smaller than ChromeOS and as quick.
It is vastly easier than Alpine. It is cleaner and simpler than antiX and it's prettier too.
And with my ~30 years of Linux experience, there is not a chance in hell I could install Debian and make it this small and this fast. It would take me months of careful study to even begin to learn what to remove to get it down to 400MB of RAM. It's taken me 8 releases of Alpine to learn how to get it to a full networked desktop in only a day of work. PiOS takes 15 min.
Incidentally, I also tried Alpine on a Raspberry Pi. After 3 days of work, I gave up getting a GUI desktop running.
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