I have made an image for the Starfive Visionfive 1.3b that has only the offical Debian Repository in the APT sources and has partial GPU support.
The purpose of this image is to test if users who want to use a free/open architecture can have “usable” desktop experience with support for latest security patches for the packages (well, apart for a “minor detail” like the kernel which still has to be the patched 6.12.5 kernel 
) with the visionfive2. This image includes a non-accelerated relatively responsive XFCE (X11) environment and I highly recommend to use this or a similar efficient desktop environment (it’s the default).
This image is based on the 2025-10 release of the starfivetech image (https://debian.starfivetech.com). I have only tested this with and SD card, I don’t know if it works with PCIe SSDs.
Status of GPU Support:
What works:
- OpenGL and vulkan contexts (glxgears, vkcube for example)
- accelerated video with vlc
What doesn’t work:
- hardware-accelerated interfaces (however since the gpu is so weak I find that it doesn’t really make the UI experience better)
You can verify it by running:
user@starfive:~$ glxinfo | grep "direct rendering"
direct rendering: Yes
The tools glxgears and vkcube state cpu/llvmpipe but I guess that’s because the gpu-modules are not included in the usual libs.
In a test I get around 58+ FPS with glxgears but maybe that’s just the refreshrate-limit of the monitor and it could go higher:
user@starfive:~$ glxgears
2 frames in 7.0 seconds = 0.286 FPS
291 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.083 FPS
297 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.392 FPS
291 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.005 FPS
You can also open VLC and switch the output to OpenGL and it will work (but better leave it at Automatic I guess).
I ran tasksel to install XFCE so it comes with a few applications like Libreoffice. I also preinstalled the (currently) latest Firefox-ESR 140.10.2 and Thunderbird. Just apt purge the stuff you don’t need. Or purge and reinstall them from one of debians mirrors if you want a more official source (you can also reinstall the kernel from starfivetech or compare sha256sums, it’s the same kernel).
You can download and try it here (user: user, password: starfive):
Mirror:
This image uses mesa 26 from the sid repository. As long as you don’t:
- change the kernel (of course you can update it with a newer working kernel for the board if one gets released)
- change the mesa packages
- change vlc for watching videos
you should be fine with installing new packages.
Regarding watching videos:
I have included 2 testvideos and a fullscreen-video-script in /home/user/start_video.sh which changes the resolution to something 480p-ish and reverts it after vlc closes so the gpu can focus on the video and not about drawing UIs. 480p videos with reasonable bitrates are quite watchable in fullscreen (they seem to need to “warm up” the first few secs). The included 720p video runs okay-ish if you use a 480p display resolution but in 1920x1080 it stutters heavily. I’m no encoding-expert so the videos look worse than they could but I tested it with properly encoded videos and it looks/flows good. Very high bitrates and VP9 are still slow though.
This is a project for testing. I’m not responsible for any issues that might come up when using this image.
For some more details on this and info on how this was made from the stock image, see the GitHub - ilrehr/starfive: Repository for experimental Imagebuilds for the Starfive Visionfive 2 · GitHub
Hopefully someone finds this useful. 
I guess I was fooled by the “direct rendering: Yes” of glxinfo and the translation layers for OpenGL/Vulkan.