Download and install

Pi-Desktop 4.0 "Plaid" for the Orange Pi 5B. One compressed image, one checksum file, about 1.5 GB to download.

What you need

An Orange Pi 5B. Other RK3588 boards are not supported by this image.
A microSD card of 16 GB or more (the image is about 7.3 GB uncompressed and grows to fill the card on first boot), or the board's eMMC.
An HDMI monitor, keyboard and mouse for the first boot. 120 Hz needs an HDMI 2.1 monitor and cable; 4K at 60 Hz works on any 4K HDMI monitor.
A power supply rated for the board. A marginal phone charger browns out under load and looks exactly like a software crash.

1. Verify the checksum

Each release ships the image and a .sha256 file next to it. On Linux or macOS, in the folder you downloaded to:

sha256sum -c Pi-Desktop-4.0-Plaid-*.sha256
# expected output: <image name>: OK

On Windows: certutil -hashfile <image file> SHA256 and compare with the contents of the .sha256 file. The exact file names are on the release page.

2. Write the image

Writing the image erases the card or eMMC completely. Pick one method.

GNOME Disks (Linux)

Insert the card. Open Disks, select the card in the left column — check its size, not just its name.
Menu (⋮) ▸ Restore Disk Image…, choose the downloaded image. Disks reads .xz images directly; for a .zst image decompress it first (zstd -d).
Start Restoring, wait for it to finish, then eject.

balenaEtcher (Linux, macOS, Windows)

Flash from file ▸ select the downloaded image (if Etcher refuses the compressed file, decompress it first).
Select target ▸ the card. Check the size.
Flash. Etcher verifies the write itself.

dd (Linux, macOS)

Find the device first (lsblk on Linux, diskutil list on macOS) and make sure it is the card, not your system disk. Replace /dev/sdX:

# .xz image
xz -dc Pi-Desktop-4.0-Plaid-*.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync
# .zst image
zstd -dc Pi-Desktop-4.0-Plaid-*.img.zst | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync
sync

3. First boot

Insert the card, connect the monitor, keyboard and mouse, power on. The first boot takes longer: it grows the filesystem to the whole card.
Armbian's setup asks for a user name, a password, your real name and a shell. Pi-Desktop then asks for a computer name (it suggests <user>-pidesktop). The time zone and locale are suggested from your public IP address (see the privacy page) and can be changed.
The setup session logs you in without asking. From the next boot on, you get a login screen.
On an HDMI 2.1 monitor, 120 Hz is in Settings ▸ Displays ▸ Refresh Rate. Pi-Desktop How-To.txt on the desktop explains screen scaling at 120 Hz, how to get Google Chrome, and the apps that install on first click.
Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Thunderbird, VSCodium and Google Chrome are in the app grid as placeholders; the first click downloads the real app from its own repository (you will be asked for your password).

Wi-Fi during setup: the wizard can join a Wi-Fi network for the time-zone lookup. WPA3 and WPA2/WPA3 networks work on this image; earlier images and stock Armbian 26.04 refuse them (kernel patch 0006).

4. Installing to eMMC

The 5B's onboard eMMC is faster and more reliable than any microSD, and it is also where most "I installed it and the board misbehaves" reports come from: on RK3588 the bootloader and the operating system can come from different places, and copying a root filesystem onto the eMMC does not install a bootloader. Write the whole image to the eMMC, from a running Pi-Desktop on a microSD, and read EMMC-INSTALL.md first — it covers identifying the right device, wiping a factory-Android eMMC, and maskrom recovery.

Something wrong?

Read KNOWN-ISSUES first. Then open an issue with your board revision, how you installed (SD / eMMC), your monitor's resolution and refresh rate, and uname -a. Security problems go through the security page.