You've finally got yourself a Raspberry Pi and some decent amount of time on your hands, and you're ready to make all those cool Instagram-inspired projects into reality.

The first thing you'll need, of course, is a power supply. Next, a boot media. For instance, a microSD card with enough storage and speed should do the trick just fine).

Depending on your Raspberry Pi model, you can boot an operating system from various storage devices such as USB drives, storage units connected via HAT, or even network storage. One thing you'll absolutely need is an operating system installed on your Raspberry Pi.

If you are dead-set on installing the official Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) on your device, then you'll want an instrumental piece of software kit called Raspberry Pi Imager.

Ever used Microsoft's Media Creation tool? If the answer is yes, well, Raspberry Pi Imager is very similar. It's an app that makes it very convenient for you to install Raspberry Pi OS (and other OSes) to a microSD card.

It's an image writer app that makes flashing ISO, IMG and other similar files to USB drives and SD cards, thus allowing you to effortlessly install them on your Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi Imager is a very simple app. Upon first starting the app, you're greeted with a simple and sleek Qt 6 GUI. First, you have to choose your Raspberry Pi Device from the list.

Next, select the desired OS from the second list (please note that the Imager always displays the recommended version of OS for your Raspberry Pi model at the top of the list).

Connect the desired storage device to your computer (again, a microSD card is a good choice), and click Choose Storage. You'll be prompted by a popup, where you can opt to either keep the OS default or perform additional customization.

For instance, from the menu, you can preconfigure things such as a username and password, default Wi-Fi credentials, device hostname, time zone, keyboard layout, and even remote connectivity.

There are other more advanced customization options, but once they're done, you're finally ready to write the OS to your storage medium.

More information about this app (as well as AppImage binaries) can be found on the project's official GitHub repository. Also, I highly recommend everyone to check out the Getting started page on the official Raspberry Pi website.