The Raspberry Pi Foundation just revealed an early Christmas gift for all the good little Linux lovers and Raspberry Pi fans across the globe, as the organization announced that they've ported an early prototype of the Raspberry Pi's Pixel desktop experience to Mac and Windows Pcs. That means users can now run the gorgeous Pixel desktop experience natively on their regular laptop by booting from a USB drive.

The PIXEL desktop has been optimized to run on the Pi's relatively modest, smartphone-targeted hardware, with the latest release of the board packing a quad-core 1.2GHz ARM-based processor.

According to PcWorld, Pixel is a Linux desktop experience based on Debian Linux. The Raspberry Pi Foundation first rolled it out to Pi devices in September. Pixel is designed to be a low resource desktop environment that will give more features than typical Raspberry Pi desktop distribution.

TechRepublic reported that the approach taken in porting the desktop to x86 machines, PIXEL is suited for running on older Pcs ehich are too slow to run modern operating systems says Eben Upton co-creator of the Raspberry Pi.

The Mac/PC release of the desktop includes the same bundled office suite, browser, educational games and programming tools users can find on PIXEL on the Pi, apart from Minecraft and Wolfram Mathematica, due to licensing reasons.

For now Pixel for PC and Mac is just an experiment, and an early one at that. Upton warns that some hardware configurations may not match the software and will not be able to work properly due to wide variety of hardware out there. If this version of the desktop turns into a more official project then the Raspberry Pi folks will work to fix any issues that arise during use.

The Pi was designed to get kids to learn about computers and programming, and Upton said this latest move will also allow schools to run PIXEL on PCs in classrooms, allowing students to use the same software and tools in lessons that they use on their Pi at home.

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