Let's be honest: Linux is harder to master than Windows. Sometimes it's not user-friendly, and following an outdated tutorial may break your Raspberry Pi's operating system.
There is no centralized software repository, except for the apt
repositories which lack many desktop applications.
Surely there is a better way! There is.
Introducing Pi-Apps, a well-maintained collection of app installation-scripts that you can run with one click.
Pi-Apps now serves over 1,000,000 people and hosts over 200 apps.
Open a terminal and run this command:
wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Botspot/pi-apps/master/install | bash
git clone https://github.com/Botspot/pi-apps
~/pi-apps/install
~/pi-apps/uninstall
pi-apps
~/pi-apps/gui
~/pi-apps/updater gui
~/pi-apps/updater cli
Message from a pi-top employee: "Happy to say that I recommend pi-apps to almost every school I work with when they start using Raspberry Pi"
Video by ETA Prime: "It's an awesome Raspberry Pi app store and it works really well and there's lots of great stuff in here and it's super easy to install. I want to give the devs of Pi-Apps a big shout-out."
Video by leepspvideo: "Thanks so much to Botspot for creating this; it's a great program."
Video by Novaspirit Tech: "This is an awesome application for your Pi to install applications like WoR-flasher."
Email from a Raspberry Pi employee: "I gave Pi-Apps a go a while back and have suggested it to others quite a few times. We can't provide all the options people may want, so it helps a lot that there are people like you who can help bridge the gap. Thank you Botspot!"
ShiftPlusOne (Raspberry Pi forum moderator): "Thanks for the great work making it all simple for everybody."
Email from Sakaki (legendary RPi developer): "Good luck with your projects, Botspot, you're really making waves!"
Message from one of our many satisfied users: "Thank you for making pi-apps, it has helped me a ton (no more searching hours to find how to install etcher) and I cannot thank you enough."
Pi-Apps is very easy to use.
This is the main window.
Opening a category will reveal a list of apps:
On the right is the app details window:
If you install/uninstall an app, you will see the progress window, keep installing/uninstalling apps to add them to the queue:
Pi-Apps Settings can be configured by launching Menu -> Preferences -> Pi-Apps Settings. In addition to changeable settings, this window also gives access to these tools:
To learn more about Pi-Apps, read the documentation and the wiki.
You don't need to be a programmer to help!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If your application is on Pi-Apps, please consider adding this pretty badge/hyperlink to your README (dark and light modes available):
Embed code (Dark):
[![badge](https://github.com/Botspot/pi-apps/blob/master/icons/badge.png?raw=true)](https://github.com/Botspot/pi-apps)
Embed code (Light):
[![badge](https://github.com/Botspot/pi-apps/blob/master/icons/badge-light.png?raw=true)](https://github.com/Botspot/pi-apps)
For a long time I have been saddened by how difficult it is to install software on Linux. In that regard, nearly all other operating systems put us to shame. How will people discover useful, free software? Most people don't. One day I realized: Why not make a collection of scripts to install popular apps? This would save so much time, and makes it much easier to use a Raspberry Pi as a daily, desktop computer solution.
Why would you think it's not still under development? 🤪 Pi-Apps took around 14 days to lay the groundwork, and ever since then it has been continually, and exponentially, improved. I (Botspot) am not the sole programmer anymore - others have stepped in and made improvements too.
Absolutely! In the future, I may allow donations, but Pi-Apps itself will always be free and open-source.