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That Random Guy

Member

Registered: 2018-02-02

Posts: 9

My experience with Q4OS + Pi 5 so far ...in 2025

Hello,

I finally pulled myself together to buy a Raspberry Pi 5. I ended up getting something I could pick up at a local MicroCenter and went ahead and got the Cana kit version(?).

Anyway, as appealing as many other projects offer their own distro and images that will run on this kind of board, I chose to try Q4OS because I recalled liking it when I tasted it a few years back when helping out a relative.

So far, the experience has been positively surprising and while I probably won’t get into everything, I just wanted to share my thoughts on my particular experience.

To start, the Q4OS imager being provided made the process of getting it on the SD card so much easier. I didn’t have to worry about what commands I needed to run or if I was using the right software. Yada yada yada. The project including this for the community is very much appreciated from me (and I’m sure others).

That process went smooth. When it finally came time to boot up the image, I was a little confused at first. I should preface what I’m going to say next by saying that while I have high appreciation for GNU/Linux and FOSS, I am by no means an advanced guru level expert on it. As a matter of fact, I would consider myself more of a consumer of it than a developer or maintainer.

First impressions post-flashing and first boot was not so great. I got a bash shell and there were some not so helpful output text above my prompt but I didn’t know if that meant I needed more to do or less to do. The manual available for this experimental image wasn’t the best either but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from using Q4OS. I’ll say why next…

I had the privilege of using AntiX in the past and I had gone through at one point using the LIVE environment to install the rest of the GUI that they provide for their project. Taking what I learned from that experience, I ran startx command and was surprised to see that some kind of GUI was loading up but was instead greeted with what seemed like a setup wizard where it asked me to set my user password (even though I set this using Q4OS imager), timezone, and I believe WiFi connection. When this finished, all I saw was the mouse cursor on screen and while I could move it around, the context menu did nothing and AFAIK nothing else was loading.

Immediately following that, I ran under the suspicion that TrinityDE was not running and so after confirming with ps, I then surmised that perhaps the wrong run level was being used as default. I had to run systemctl set-default graphical.target and then after a reboot, I was seeing the familiar splash and Q4OS loading splash. That was one hurdle over. In  hindsight, I can understand the decision to have the default run level be multiuser target instead of graphical likely due to the source supplying the same base image for models of the Pi that aren’t very packed with RAM. Mine had 8GB and so I was comfortable with running a DE.

Next hurdle was getting my browser of choice, LibreWolf. To my surprise and although I had Internet access, the default browser Konquerer would not load even duckduckgo. I turned to my other spare PC and ran searches for how to get this on Raspberry PI and long story short, I find out that while they appear to supply packages for ARM—and this is only because Mozilla does for Firefox—I could not find something for the Raspberry PI in particular. I even tried a project called Pi-apps which loads a GUI software manager that can apparently grab LibreWolf. I tried that and enabling extrarepo per LibreWolf’s docs and not surprisingly, couldn’t find an available package for the needed architecture. So I did the next best thing and installed Firefox, which was available. Moving on….

I also needed my mouse adjusted to get the middle-click swapped with the right-click button. I use a vertical mouse and this just makes it more comfortable to use. On Windows, I have to go through the trouble of installing a driver to make this very basic change. I had never done this before on Gnu/Linux and so what I eventually found success with was adding this line to my user’s .profile under $HOME:

xmodmap -e 'pointer = 1 3 2'

  Idk why it can’t be that easy on Windows but go figure. Moving on…

I was testing a must-have thing--that which being my VPN of choice…. and after some initial Googling, it almost seemed like my vendor didn’t supply something for RaspberryPi OS type platforms but eventually I did find something. To my surprise, and this was a make-it-or-break it for me, my consumer VPN worked and I was able to connect just as easy as I do with my other Gnu/Linux box which runs Lubuntu. I was happy about that. Moving on...

My next hurdle was then getting leafpad and Keepass running. While these installed fine, I kept getting the spinny icon and nothing opened up. When I tried to launch from terminal, I got an error that read something like “libEGL fatal: did not find extension DRI_Mesa version 1”. At that point, I decided to do an apt update && apt upgrade. I eventually looked at the RaspberryPi OS docs and they apparently include something called full-upgrade. After running all of these, I rebooted and was able to get Keepass and leafpad open. This was not happening with other apps and so I’m not sure what the problem there was but this was practically post-flash and could be something to look at for the base image.

After all of that, I was able to install my usual apps like LibreOffice, Veracrypt and VLC just fine.

TL;DR:
Currently, my only few ongoing hurdles are figuring out how to get something like Redshift or at least some built-in way of getting the screen brightness down. The other problem I’m having is getting my bluetooth headset connected. I have been able to pair it but it won’t connect due to some profile missing or not being found. Not sure if that’s a pipewire problem out of the box or if it’s because of something Debian caused but still working on it. Also I changed themes and now my terminal app won't go back to black background with white text.

All in all, I have been very pleased with my experience so far and I would recommend this for others that would like to have an alternative PC for running Gnu/Linux at a much cheaper price than getting something new or maybe even refurbished. Looking forward to my future with Q4OS and the Pi.

Last edited by That Random Guy (2025-04-27 20:04)

q4osteam

Q4OS Team

Registered: 2015-12-06

Posts: 4,804

Website

Re: My experience with Q4OS + Pi 5 so far ...in 2025

Thanks for the detailed report, we will read it carefully and try to address the issues mentioned.

... how to get something like Redshift

We can recommend you to install "redshift-gtk" package, login to the session and see the applet icon in system tray. You may need to configure your geo location to make that work properly. This small app works just fine.

... I ran startx command and was surprised to see that some kind of GUI was loading up  ... I had to run systemctl set-default graphical.target and then after a reboot, I was seeing the familiar splash and Q4OS loading splash. That was one hurdle over. In  hindsight, I can understand the decision to have the default run level be multiuser target instead of graphical likely due to the source supplying the same base image for models of the Pi that aren’t very packed with RAM.

This is likely a bug, the system should go to the Trinity DE session on the first boot by default. What Pi model exactly and screen do you have ? Is it connected via HDMI ?

That Random Guy

Member

Registered: 2018-02-02

Posts: 9

Re: My experience with Q4OS + Pi 5 so far ...in 2025

We can recommend you to install "redshift-gtk" package, login to the session and see the applet icon in system tray. You may need to configure your geo location to make that work properly. This small app works just fine.

Thanks! I'll take a look. I installed it yesterday but I need to go through now and figure out how to configure.

This is likely a bug, the system should go to the Trinity DE session on the first boot by default. What Pi model exactly and screen do you have ? Is it connected via HDMI ?

The board is a Raspberry Pi 5 with the 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor and 8GB RAM. The video connection is HDMI from the board to a KVM switch and then from that to the HDMI port on my monitor. The monitor itself is not new or expensive and is only FHD display.

I always do eventually see something on the screen and really only on the first-time boot where I was only seeing bash first.

Incidentally, I have made some progress with getting the bluetooth working with headset but not quite there yet. Will probably make another thread about it since it would make it confusing to talk about it here.