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, including 10-bit — 4K60 YouTube and 4K HEVC Main10 run on the RK3588's video engine, not the CPU. The driver doing it is ours: the rockchip-vaapi fork (v2.1.4) — H.264, HEVC, VP9 at 8 and 10 bits, verified pixel-identical to software decode. Jellyfin's web client direct-plays 10-bit in Firefox in hardware. (AV1 is software; 10-bit at 4K60 can stutter until the next driver phase — see KNOWN-ISSUES.)
• 🦊 Firefox is the default browser — flicker-free (no ANGLE) and hardware-decoded, out of the box, with update-proof policies. Chrome rides along for one job: DRM streaming — it bundles Google's own Widevine, and ships pre-flagged so Netflix just plays. Chromium (rkmpp) stays for those who want it — with our fork of its decode plug-in, so 10-bit files no longer take its GPU process down.
• 🖱️ mpv 0.38 — drag a file onto the player and it plays (a Wayland fix 0.36 never had)
• 🛡️ Pro Updates — free security updates without an Ubuntu Pro subscription, green out of the box
• 🔵 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; fixed since v1.0
• 📧 Betterbird mail, LibreOffice Writer + Calc, VSCodium, VLC, 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. (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. The video driver follows the same rule: it refuses to advertise codecs that don't actually work, so players fall back to correct software playback instead of a green wall. Release notes say what a release doesn't fix, too.

Download

v2.0.2 — 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 — the guide covers the correct install, wiping a factory-Android eMMC, and maskrom recovery.

The recipe is public

Every hook, every flag, every fix — with its reasoning in the comments: defcom5-rockchip/ubuntu-rockchip. Don't trust the image; audit the recipe.

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 (with Claude as co-engineer)