Is Pi-Apps Lightweight and Customizable?

Updated

Yes. Pi-Apps is designed to be lightweight and customizable: it uses YAD, which is built on the GTK toolkit, so it requires relatively few system resources. It also follows your system theme and lets you customize its GUI with any installed GTK themes.

What makes Pi-Apps lightweight

Pi-Apps is a Raspberry Pi app store for open-source projects, and its interface is built on YAD (Yet Another Dialog), which itself sits on the GTK toolkit. According to the Pi-Apps site, this stack "requires not a lot of system resources."

That matters on a Raspberry Pi or other ARM Linux device, where RAM and CPU headroom are often limited. A lightweight front end means the app store itself doesn't compete with the apps you're actually running.

How customization works

Pi-Apps follows your system theme by default, so it blends into the rest of your desktop without extra configuration. On top of that, you can customize its GUI with any installed GTK themes.

In practice, that means:

  • Default behavior: Pi-Apps matches whatever system theme you're already using.
  • Custom look: If you have other GTK themes installed, you can apply them to Pi-Apps' interface.

Other things Pi-Apps does

Beyond being light on resources, the site lists these features:

Feature What it does
App details Read an app's description, visit its website, see how popular it is, and review install/uninstall scripts
Install/uninstall progress Install or uninstall multiple apps at once and track their progress
Update notifications Pi-Apps notifies you when your installed apps have available updates

Getting involved

The site notes you don't need to be a programmer to help. The easiest way is to "star" the repository, which helps more people find Pi-Apps. You can also make suggestions, report bugs, suggest apps, or create and submit an app — the site says submitting a simple apt-package is especially easy, though you should check the app eligibility rubric first. There's also a Discord community for support and development.

Pi-Apps will always remain free and open source, with all code on GitHub under the GPL-3 license (the website source is also GPL-3).