Armbian is a Linux distribution designed for ARM development boards. It is usually based on one of the stable or development versions of Debian or Ubuntu and it supports a wide variety of popular ARM-based devices, including Banana Pi, Cubieboard, Olimex, Orange Pi, Odroid, Pine64 and others. Armbian includes a menu-driven configuration tool along with stock Debian utilities, the Bash shell, and a choice of Cinnamon or Xfce desktop.
To compare the software in this project to the software available in other distributions, please see our Compare Packages page.
Notes: In case where multiple versions of a package are shipped with a distribution, only the default version appears in the table. For indication about the GNOME version, please check the "nautilus" and "gnome-shell" packages. The Apache web server is listed as "httpd" and the Linux kernel is listed as "linux". The KDE desktop is represented by the "plasma-desktop" package and the Xfce desktop by the "xfdesktop" package.
Colour scheme:green text = latest stable version, red text = development or beta version. The function determining beta versions is not 100% reliable due to a wide variety of versioning schemes.
Tried both the Jammy verson and the Bookworm CLI version on an OrangePi 5. Both works flawlessy, the Debian-based Bookworm with slightly newer packages. After installing the Bookworm CLI-version, you end up as root in a shell. Run 'apt update', 'apt upgrade', 'apt install tasksel', 'tasksel'. Choose your DE and other options with the spacebar. Tab to 'Ok' and push 'Enter'. When all is finished, reboot with '/sbin/init 6'.
I prefer to have my '/home'-directory on a seperate partition, on my OPi5 it is a NVmE-card. I add this to '/etc/fstab' while still in the root shell, before first reboot. Armbian uses UUID as partition identificator. Find it with 'blkid'.
It was the newest 23.02.02 version I downloaded for a normal 64 bit Intel/AMD PC.
It came as a 2 GB img file which inflated to 9 GB+ on a USB stick using Belena Etcher.
It doesn't use persistence, but I did find an option to save the session and it seems to work fine.
Bad start as I noticed the spinning dotted circle favoured by Microsoft as it loaded - please drop that unnecessary nod to Windows, you can do better and are risking a possible lawsuit too.
Not the quickest loader, but that may be down to the USB2 stick I used and it does run at an acceptable speed once it's eventually loaded.
Comes with Google Chrome (and Firefox for all you purists) along with a fairly sensible set of common programs without appearing too bloated.
I know it's not really meant for 'normal' PC's but it does a good job as a portable OS and barely uses 1/2 a GB of RAM to boot to the desktop.
i used this distribution on my Orange Pi PC for more than 3 years, while there was no other distributions supporting the board officially. this was the best experience, for me on using GNU\Linux in 12 years. I am moving to Arch-Linux but before that it was good enough that i searched for X86_64 version of this distribution for my AMD PC. it is very satisfying and pleasing to use. in other word it is just Awesome. butt i wish there was a i3wm desktop version of it, specially for boards with 1GB RAM
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