The Raspberry Pi lineup of single-board computers has had a few improvements lately with a new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 that ended up being similar in performance to the Raspberry Pi 3. Finally, the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS (previously called Raspbian), is getting official 64-bit support despite the hardware being capable of 64-bit instructions since 2016’s Raspberry Pi 3.
The post on the official site breaks the update down in a little bit more detail, but as someone who uses Raspberry Pi devices for a ton of odd jobs, it is nice to know they’re finally a little bit more up-to-date and applications will be able to address more than 4 gigs of RAM with this update. I’ve run into a few pieces of software that I want to run on a Raspberry Pi 4 that require a 64-bit ARM operating system, and compatibility workarounds aren’t always available unless you’re willing to spend hours of time recompiling things like this is Slackware in 1998 so this should be a welcome change for anyone else who has run into these corner cases and wants one less barrier to doing all the weird crap you can do with a Raspberry Pi, though it ultimately may not help emulated or native games on the Pi that much.
