Jarvy Jarvison's PiSlide OS Is a Write-Minimized Single-Purpose Raspberry Pi OS for Slideshows
With a mostly-read-only filesystem and simple configuration, PiSlide OS does one job and does it well.
Developer Jarvy Jarvison has designed a Linux-based operating system for the Raspberry Pi with a twist: it's designed solely for the task of turning the single-board computers into dedicated slideshow devices, with a minimum of fuss.
"PiSlide OS is the simplest way to get photo slideshows working on a Raspberry Pi," Jarvison claims of his creation. "It supports most common image formats (JPG, PNG, WEBP, AVIF, JXL, HEIF, HEIC, SVG, BMP, TIFF, and QOI) with plans for animated GIFs and maybe even videos in the future!"
The Raspberry Pi family has long been a popular choice for those looking to turn a monitor, TV, or projector into a rotating display — whether as a simple digital photoframe or a commercial advertising hoarding, where the low-cost low-power single board computers are increasingly found. Rather than configure a general-purpose operating system each time, though, Jarvison decided to make his own Linux distribution that does nothing else.
PiSlide OS, Jarvison says, should be compatible with any model of mainstream Raspberry Pi single-board computer — though, at the time of writing, had only been tested on a Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, and Raspberry Pi 4 — and is configured to minimize writes to the microSD Card. "Due to how the OS is set up," Jarvison explains, "it is generally safe to unplug the Pi after PiSlide OS has started."
The operating system is available to download as a flashable image from the project's GitHub repository, where build scripts are made available under the GNU Affero General Public License 3; instructions for configuring the slideshow are included.