Amidst all the Windows 11 news, it turns out that the Raspberry Pi 4 can run Microsoft's upcoming OS. At least, it appears so.

The Raspberry Pi is typically associated with the Linux OS, which tends to have a hard time dealing with the graphical intensity of other fancy OSes. Officially, Pi users who want to run the new Windows OS on their devices are restricted to Windows 10 IoT Core. Simply put, this is a scaled-down version of Windows 10 for less-intensive applications, but it falls a bit short.

But now, both Tom's Hardware and the YouTube channel leepsvideo, among others on the web, have managed to install an Insider Preview version of Windows 11 on a Raspberry Pi 4 (via Golem) with Successes. [This is a welcome but slight surprise since the RPi 4's 64-bit Broadcom BCM2711B0 4-core, 4-thread A72 processor (ARMv8-A) at up to 1.5GHz is not officially listed in the Windows 11 Compatibility Cookbook. Initially set to exclude first-generation AMD Ryzen CPUs and pre-Coffee Lake Intel processors, some edits were made to the Windows 11 minimum compatibility.

However, now that Windows 11 has been confirmed to run on RPi 4 (4GB or 8GB), the claim that Windows 11 may support AMD Zen and Intel Kaby Lake CPUs has some weight.

The main takeaway is that running Windows 11 on the Raspberry Pi 4 is possible, albeit in a somewhat limited capacity, as expected of a processor that grazes the hard floor of system requirements. according to Tom's, YouTube videos only run at 480p It appears that it will not. Still, it is said to work at least as well as past attempts to run Windows 10 in 2020.

This means that if Windows 11 is released later this year, it may be the best bet for RPi users to run the Microsoft OS on their Pi4 projects.

Whether or not the final Windows 11 build will be Pi-compatible is not known. Much could change between now and the Windows 11 release date later this year.