On the A04 and A06 product pages, they are bundled with a TF-card with clockworkOS. I wonder if they also support Raspberry Pi OS.
After reading this topic, I have less trust in clockworkOS and would get A04 or A06 if only they supported Raspberry Pi OS. Otherwise, CM3 seems like the best option for me.
Hmm well I hope so. Really surprising how no one from Clockworkpi seems to post here? I guess worst comes to worst, I can pickup a CM3 for $40 and replace the A04. But damn, I hope it does work with RP OS or Ubuntu.
That topic is very old! The OS went through couple of versions and community improvements. With a bit of will everything is possible, for example there was a member that installed Arch Linux to their gameshell.
+1 to the above comment, re: the quoted thread being old. It was thanks fo the community that we all came together and solved the Lima driver problems, which seem to be the source of that thread’s woes.
The community will find a way, just like they always have; if enough people want it. That includes putting raspberry Pi OS on the gameshell.
Even if you can’t specifically install raspberry Pi OS, you could no doubt just install a Debian desktop environment, which is pretty much the same thing.
At the end of the day, the more that people use the clockwork OS, the quicker problems will be solved, and innovations made.
That said, if there does end up being a large raspberry Pi OS following, naturally more progress will be made on optimising that.
Guu posts fairly regularly. There also are always mods posting on the boards. Yong makes announcements. And occasionally Hal will have a few things to say.
There was a thread where Yong mentioned that the idea was to have this as a community driven forum, where there isn’t one voice that is stronger than another.
There have been plenty of venting posts in the past, such as the one quotes in the OP. Starting another one will just end up with the same things being said, and everyone’s time wasted.
That’s brilliant, thank you very much!
I’m happy to use the Clockwork OS instead of Ubuntu or RP OS. I just want to install some apps instead of just emulators. Word processor, email client, graphics app, ftp client, etc. If I can do that I’m happy as a pig in mud 
Thank you for the info, can’t wait for it to ship 
Thanks for the info!
Not really sure why some people are so attached to the Debian fork that Raspbian is.
The Raspberry Pi OS is nothing else than a semi customised fork of Debian. It really have nothing special for it apart from being dedicated to the Raspberry Pi going back to the original Raspberry Pi.
Raspbian is a 32bit ONLY as as they need to be compatible with all Raspberry Pi, also may not include some compiler optimisation for more recent ARM chip used in the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4, again for compatibility with the original Pi.
The default OS for the A04/A06, whatever the flavour (probably Debian based as that what the GameShel use), will still be a Linux based one, with mostly the same apps, and will be a proper 64bit version with apps (I hope) compiled with proper optimisation for the architecture unlike the Raspberry Pi, because they are not bound to use the same binary on a whole range of somewhat compatible devices.
And if you really want to use Raspbian and only raspbian, don’t use the A04 or A06, use the CM3 module.
copied from the header of the website:
“Welcome to Clockwork OS
Clockwork is a multi-purpose operating system based on BSD / Unix-like (and GNU / Linux for ARM). It supports many platforms. In this way, Clockwork OS, which has the ability to work in the same way on different hardware, can be made suitable for many different usage purposes thanks to the revisions in the visual interface and the changes made in the basic programs.”
So i imagine anything you could slap on a pi3/4 would work on an A04/6. that part is conjecture as ive not compared datasheets…you also explained the very reason I am a *nix purist. dont get me wrong, i love testing all the flavors in a VM or USB, but as you said… they are all derivatives. even ubuntu started as a debian fork. i dont care if you like slack or arch, fedora, or even netbsd. just be real about it and learn to configure your own ports tree.
This is like saying “can I put a Mitsubishi Lancer body kit on my Subaru Impreza”
I mean … sure you could? You’ll just have to spend more time than it’s worth to customise it to play nicely.
RPi OS was made to cater towards exact specifications of RPi devices, and addons. Eg, the HAT emulators etc. there aren’t compatible headers to attach RPi foundation hardware, so most of the features would seem pointless.
As mentioned above, RPi OS is basically the Debian OS with pre loaded apps for educational purposes for RPi, and raspberry shaped icons. You could just make a list of the programs you want, and then install them manually.
You wouldn’t be able to use the NOOBS installation on a gameshell. See the link below for why:
Perhaps you could with the devterm? I haven’t looked into it. But it’s so specifically catered to another board, that it would be more through than it’s worth.
RPI OS beta supports Aarch64, now, right? isnt that how debian, ubuntu and arch seem to do it with these other fancy SBCs sporting similar configurations to the A06 modules? the rpi 2&3 both used the a53 and the rpi 4 uses the a72 so, in theory, with maybe even only a little bit of effort, albiet with bugs perhaps, for years… even open/freeBSD seems possible, although it might take as much work as hinted at before with the arm64 support.