You can't run Debian on a RaPi5 for normal use cases, it boots, but that is it. You can run Debian userspace with a RPL/RPiOS kernel or something you compiled yourself. So that simply means RPiOS64 unless you are a system designer or developer or distro maintainer, but then you would not have posted the topic.Hello,
just wondering if anyone has some feedback on setting up the RaPi5 desktop OS to have dual boot.
The dual boot OS would be either Debian or Pi OS Lite.
'Lite' is just that it does not start a Desktop Environment, so has less SW packages installed. But it is all the same Debian based userspace. So see what @thagrol advises I would say. Else the method of @RonR, I have been using similar in the past to switch between Raspbian, RPiOS64, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu, Debian (on top of UEFI softFirmWare), etc. I still have it working I think on RPi3, but it was mostly because of special RPL HW, so TV-HAT, HW video codecs, GPU, GPIO things/busses that did not work in 64-bit. So essentially config.txt bootloader and kernel issues. RPi4 and RPI5 EEPROM code understand GPT partitions, so you can have way more than 4 partitions without risking the extended partitions getting lost. That is what PINN is about, it is simply incompatible with normal Linux installers and other HW that runs normal Debian or whatever OS out of the box.
Another way to experience/use other OS is to use virtual machines or containers. I use that extensively, it uses same principles as on other architectures, so x86-64 PC mostly and you don't need reboot or (un)plug storage devices. So you can have/run multiple OSses at the same time. With a nice/cheap NVME it all works very fast and reliable, forget about imaging SD-cards. If container, it even can share all storage in a blink of an eye if using Btrfs filesystem.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Wed Nov 19, 2025 9:33 am