Unlike my usual Raspberry Pi hacks, the kiosk would need a monitor and a window system. So instead of my usual Raspbian Lite install, I opted for a full Raspbian desktop image.

Mistake. First, the Raspbian desktop is very slow. I intended to use a Pi Zero W for the kiosk, but even on a Pi 3 the desktop was sluggish.

More important, the desktop is difficult to configure. For instance, a kiosk needs to keep the screen on, so I needed to disable the automatic screen blanking. There are threads all over the web asking how to disable screen blanking, with lots of solutions that no longer apply because Raspbian keeps changing where desktop configuration files are stored.

Incredibly, the official Raspbian answer for how to disable screen blanking in the desktop — I can hardly type, I'm laughing so hard — is: install xscreensaver, which will then add a configuration option to turn off the screensaver. (I actually tried that just to see if it would work, but changed my mind when I saw the long list of dependencies xscreensaver was going to pull in.)

I never did find a way to disable screen blanking, and after a few hours of fighting with it, I decided it wasn't worth it. Setting up Raspbian Lite is so much easier and I already knew how to do it. If I didn't, Die Antwort has a nice guide, Setup a Raspberry Pi to run a Web Browser in Kiosk Mode, that uses my preferred window manager, Openbox. Here are my steps, starting with a freshly burned Raspbian Lite SD card.