Arch ARM is for some reason forced to be a separate, second class project, and ARM-only pkgbuilds are systematically removed from the AUR. It's shortsighted and stupid. However I've still had decent luck with arch on arm (Danctnix, specifically)
What is the best option if you wanted to run Linux on ARM?
These days I'm more interested in the ARM world rather than the x86 world because ARM is simpler, power-efficient, scalable from cortex M0 to X4 and everything in between, and I took a class on ARM assembly language. x86, on the other hand, is full of legacy cruft and complicated as a result, and x86 is power hungry. Look at the new Intel 14900K, it draws over 400W!
What is the best option if you wanted to run Linux on ARM?
Good question.
These days I’m more interested in the ARM world rather than the x86 world because ARM is simpler, power-efficient,
scalable from cortex M0 to X4 and everything in between, and I took a class on ARM assembly language. x86, on the other hand,
is full of legacy cruft and complicated as a result, and x86 is power hungry. Look at the new Intel 14900K, it draws over 400W!
Last year Hetzner introduced arm64-based cloud servers with Ampere processors. Looks promising. I hope more providers will follow.
Debian? They have good ARM support (the raspberry pi OS is based on Debian, uses its repos). Definitely also install flatpak. Most, but not all, flatpaks have arm builds.
Fedora works pretty well on ARM, it even became the flagship distro for the Asahi project, which aims to bring full Linux compatibility to Apple Silicon
The problem with Rpi is the file provided by Fedora is an ISO, and Rpi doesn't have a way to boot from a live USB; it needs a complete tar.gz to flash onto the SD card.
ETA: there's actually a way to make Rpi boot from a USB drive, but that's typically used to boot the entire system, not a temporary live USB. Maybe it would work, but I've never tried it.
It's been a few years since my last manual install of Fedora (I've just been upgrading it), but I got Fedora Server to install just fine. I did it one of two ways (again, I can't remember which): I either used the USB boot option to install to an SSD I attach via USB, or I booted the liveUSB on my laptop and installed to the USB SSD. In any case, Fedora has worked flawlessly for me for a few years on Pi now, so I would strongly recommend it.
Just as an aside, I highly recommend against using a microSD card if you have a Pi model that can boot from USB storage. They are far less stable than an SSD, and are not designed to withstand running an operating system from. They are also dramatically slower, and much more painful to work with. Getting a cheap USB enclosure for an SSD is a far better solution, just try to pick up an SSD with a DRAM cache. It will increase throughput and increase the lifetime of the SSD, and I would not recommend running an OS from an SSD without a DRAM cache.
EDIT: I believe this to be the easiest way to install Fedora for a Pi device. You will use a desktop/laptop Linux device, and the arm-image-installer will take an ARM ISO and install it to your storage media (SD card, microSD card, SSD, etc.). It was also the first thing I found when I looked up how to install Fedora on a Pi.
Yes, I'm also interested in ARM because it means we can have a very light laptop / tablet running a full desktop OS without the typical limitations of iOS / Android.
Debian is for sure the most stable thing in ARM, mostly because it is the upstream of many ARM-focused distributions like Armbian and there's also where ARM CPU makers usually test their stuff. There's a constant stream of patches coming from those manufacturers and downstream distributions because everyone wants to mainline both kernel and userland support for their ARMs.
Unfortunately there isn't much decent "open" tablet hardware to run Linux on. The interesting things like those ultra-thin Lenovo tablets with amazing screens have locked bootloaders and other bullshit that stops people from loading Linux into then and making drivers / the required adjustments. Then there's the Pine stuff that (even if you can get it) it's overpriced, bulky and not a finished hardware product in any way.
Don't know about best, but I've been running Arch on Raspberry Pi 4 for a few months now. So far I'm having no issues. Changing from the default kernel to rpi kernel went also smoothly.
depends on the context, arm isn't as consistent (or at least consistently supported) of a platform to build for as x86. ARM server? single board computer? (which one?) Apple Silicon? other?
Unpopular opinion, but Gentoo is perfect for ARM. Availability of pre built binaries for ARM can sometimes be an issue. Gentoo gives you the option to compile from source, so that if a package is available for x86, it will still most likely work with ARM
You can see there how devs for multiple distros and AUR helpers worked together in a civil manner to solve the issue. It was nice, people cooperated, a textbook example of what FOSS and Linux community spirit is all about.
Yet other people, years later, who aren't distro devs or AUR admins or were even impacted in any way, use that same moment as a reason to hate blindly. It's sad and disgusting.
Do tell. I mean Debian has a local root exploit right now but everybody loves Debian. Meanwhile Manjaro is the devil for a DDoS that wasn't even proven as coming from Manjaro machines. Anybody can fake a user agent.
Thing is, pamac on Manjaro could not have DDoS'ed the AUR since it caches all queries. What's the scenario, 125k new Manjaro machines all came online at the same time?
All evidence points at someone scraping the AUR and using the pamac UA as a fake-out. But still the Manjaro devs took the opportunity to improve pamac even so, they asked for more optimized endpoints to use, extended the delay before searching to 1s etc. Which yes I find wholesome under the circumstances.
They've been pretty tame lately, but there have been issues historically that made a lot of people (rightfully) mad. You ca read on them here: https://manjarno.pages.dev/
As someone who loved Manjaro and installed it everywhere, the whole thing is (was?) amateur hour run by clowns. Drama, bugs, but lots of opportunity to contribute if you were equally blind.
Technically, Endeavour does have its own repos but they only contain a relatively small number of non-essential packages. But yeah, other than that it's basically pre-configured Arch with great defaults.
No, the defaults are worse than the arch defaults, the wallpapers are ugly, dracut has worse documentation for desktop use, yay is bad, and the firewall GUI is pointless bloat (the thing on the KDE settings app is just better). Just use Arch.
It might be bad, but bad is better than nothing for tons of people. I would not have engaged with arch if it weren't for eos, but now that I have I might switch to arch in the future, after getting a "transition layer" so to speak.
I found archinstall to be very simple to follow, even though the whole thing is shown through the CLI, its basically just one page where you setup everything like partitions, boot, etc. Was a lot easier than I expected with the way everyone talks about it
Im not saying that it should, but not doing it literally reduces the distro to little more than an install script for Arch. Just use Arch with the archinstall script or the 10 minute manual install.
For the record, there's nothing wrong with Manjaro either, it doesn't deserve the Internet hate it often gets and I'm happy to use it as my daily driver.
