The Shock OS Team

Carson Grover is the founder of Shock OS.

"I created Shock OS to fill a void. I had a Raspberry Pi 4 and was searching for a suitable desktop Linux distribution. Every distro I tried had at least one of the following problems: it was too bare bones, too bloated, too slow, forced the use of Snaps (which I'm personally not a fan of), or things constantly broke (which lead me to spend more time fixing the system than actually using it). None of the Pi-compatible distros out there satisfied me. Raspberry Pi OS had the hardware optimization, but lacked the attractive desktop. Ubuntu and Manjaro based distros had a much more appealing desktop, but suffered from slow performance (due to inferior hardware optimization), constant breakdowns, and were either loaded with Snaps or used unstable packages.

Ultimately, the problem seemed to be a simple mismatch of components. After experimenting with installing various desktop environments on top of Raspberry Pi OS Lite, I found MATE to be the best. It provided the best performance with the lowest amount of screen tearing, and it was easy to shape and mold into my liking. Because Linux Mint is my favorite Linux distro, I took inspiration from it - hence the many similarities between the two operating systems.

The aim is to make Shock OS the ultimate, hands-down best choice for desktop computing on the Raspberry Pi 4."