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.
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I gave the Armbian version compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4 a try and used it for several months. In general, it works well, it comes with an extensive collection of applications (too much for my taste) installed by default and it uses the XFCE as the desktop environment.
An aspect of Armbian that I really dislike is that the configuration by default of the Firefox brower, insist on "hijacking" the startup home page, which points to the Armbian website. This cannot be easily changed by the user, because it's configured to ignore any change regarding the default startup page in the Firefox settings. Equally annoying, is the fact that it reinforce this behaivoiur whenever the Firefox package gets an update. I think it's obvious that this is something deliberate and I find it awful.
Then, after several package updates, al of a sudden, the built it wifi chip of the Raspberry Pi, got undetected and stopped working!. I'm sure this wasn't a network configuration issue. The wifi chip just simply stopped being detected for some reason. I couldn't figure out why. May be, after one of the several package updates, something related got broken. To confirm that it wasn't a hardware problem, I tried the latest version available of the Raspbery Pi OS and I had the wifi working again!.
I used the Armbian Desktop version on a Raspberry Pi 4, for a few months. It run well, for the most part. It comes with quite a lengthy collection of software installed by default (a bit too much for my taste). I had two negative experiencies with Armbian:
1) I really dislike the fact that the Firefox browser that comes installed, insist on "hijacking" the default home page on startup and points to the Armbian website by default. What's more, it's configured in such a way that it enforce this configuration even if the user tries to change this (it will be ignored) from the Firefox settings!. It's not trivial for a novice user to modify this behaviour!. More annoying, is that even if the user manages to change it, a future package update will put the "hijacking" setting back on, every time!.
2) After a few package updates with "apt", the built-in wifi chip of the Raspberry Pi 4, suddenly, got undetected!. It wasn't a network configuration issue. It seems that for the Linux kernel, the wifi card was no longer present. I worried that, somehow, the built-in wifi chip was "dead", so I installed an image of the Raspberry Pi OS, instead. This way, I got wifi working again!. Maybe this was my fault, but I couldn't figure out what went wrong with Armbian on this.