Ubuntu and Debian images built by Armbian got popular because of the sad state of affairs of most single board computers. But since Raspberry Pi boards are rather well-supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and community, plus part of it is closed-source, there’s been little motivation by the Armbian community to work on it, and that means there’s no official support for Raspberry Pi.
But some Armbian test images have just been released for Raspberry Pi 4, specifically Ubuntu 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish” images with a CLI (headless) version, and two desktop variants with Cinnamon and XFCE desktop environments which you can download on their server(s). Separately, DietPi 7.9 lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian has also been released with various improvements.
The good news about Armbian images for Raspberry Pi is that they exist, but the less good news is that those are still “test images”, and the popular board is not yet an officially supported Armbian SBC. 9to5linux quickly tested Armbian nightly builds on Raspberry Pi 4, and found most features to work, except audio. There’s still no maintainer for the Raspberry Pi 4 images, and if you’d like to get involved you can apply to become the official maintainer for Raspberry Pi Armbian images. If nobody volunteers, support will be dropped from Armbian.
DietPi has been around at least since 2015 to provide lightweight Debian images for Raspberry Pi boards, but also other models such as ODROID, Radxa, and Pine64 single board computers. The latest DietPi 7.9 adds password protection for DietPi-Dashboard, multi-backup archives for DietPi-Backup, enhanced Apache PHP setup (php-fpm support), as well as better GPU accelerated video playback on Raspberry Pi, among other changes. DietPi supports Debian Buster, Stretch, and BullsEye Debian, but DietPi 7.9 will be the latest release for Debian 9 “Buster” that was first outed in 2017. A more detailed changelog can be found in the announcement.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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