For 2.5 any “best” OS to look at? just raspian with no gui? or ubuntu server? Thanks!
I always use Raspbian Lite. But I use Rhasspy in Docker, so the underlying distribution isn’t even that important, except for hardware drivers.
Same here, raspbian Lite (buster) on both pi4 and pi0
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When there is no good reason for a different distro I would always choose raspbian on the raspberry pi, simply since it is the one everything is tested on by the raspberry pi foundation (so you definetly have good hardware driver support). And then I usually simply use the lite version of the latest release, since I do not want to have all the GUI stuff running without even using them. So right now raspbian Lite buster.
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Raspbian is a really good general purpose OS but I do have at times prefer the minimalism of Archlinux Arm.
If you get past the initial confusion of image creation it can be extremely performant and relatively easy to use.
Haven’t tried it yet with Rhasspy.
I have not yet really seen any Ubuntu advantage over Raspbian apart from 64bit, but haven’t looked for a while but stayed with a preference for Raspbian-Lite.
To be honest of late due to the cost of AEC/VAD mic arrays I have been wondering especially for satelites if the Pi is the right choice.
Some extremely low cost silicon is starting to emerge purely for that purpose the Radxa RK3308 is the only SBC I currently know and its tempting even though they have made a bit of a hash of it and tried to make it general purpose which is a strange choice due to being an extremely specific low cost audio SoC.
I wouldn’t really bother about OS just ask the question if you are going to play media and is AEC/VAD essential as for that purpose many think so, unless you want a Forrest Rhasppy that once started playing media you will be unable to stop.
I am really starting to dig Rhasspy as its so flexible has so much choice to deployment, is a Pi just a master to a satelite system or even is there no Pi and we are talking Nuc & audio specific SoCs like the RK3308/2108 or Allwinner R328/R329 satelites that we might see arrive as alternatives.
Its still all very Pi and of Debian base and Raspbian lite is a great and probably default choice, but a ‘biantu’ distro is likely to work.
But manner of use can dictate some addon hardware that is considerabilly more cost than any Pi and have been more perplexed about what hardware I may use.
so my thought currently is to do everything off the pi3 i have. Figured i would start smaller and easy and not over complicate things till i have atleast a base level understanding of the stack. End goal is to move the main heavy lifting piece to something like a dedicated VM on my esxi environment, or a nuc or something like that and go to either matrix satellites or pi zero’s.
So raspian it is 
I’m trying to squeeze every bit of power that I can out of the Raspberry Pi 4. So, I’ve managed to install the regular Debian AARCH64 (arm 64 bits) version of buster. I’ve kept the original Raspberry Pi 4 kernel and modules, so I have wifi and audio support. (I didn’t test anything else).
Since I’m trying to use a better TTS and a better wake word detection system, I need all that CPU and instruction set power…
Yeah on a Pi4 aarch64 seems to be quite an improvement
ArchLinux also do an image but prob easer on a bian.
If your trying to squeeze everything then prob the Pi is quite conservative with its clock.
/boot/config.txt
over_voltage=2
arm_freq=1800
I have one of those ‘armour’ heatsink/case with a 12v 40mm fan just slowly tickling away. 5v are too noisey at full speed so I am just lazy and use a 12v on 5v with no control.
But with the above never go above 45’c with high load, 35’c idle and it will give you 20% with no problems.
You can go up to 2K but 1800 is my safe and stable OC for the Pi4 and you don’t need all that much cooling as I have.
Just keep an eye on
watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_temp
Whilst you do some tests and see if things stay steady.
Most other Cortex-A72 run at 1800, the google Chromebooks on the RK3399 (OM1 was it called?) ran at 2k.
But if you want to keep it simple then Raspbian-lite is prob the way to go.