Both of the RHEL clones, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, build images for the Raspberry Pi 4. Those should fit your needs nicely if you're looking for something familiar and stable.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Heard good things about Rocky Linux, will add it to the candidate list, thanks!
Debian, the best Linux distro ever.
DietPI ftw, debian based… it’s just easy.
I'm weird and use ArchLinux ARM on my Raspberry Pi computers. I think it's much easier to admin, especially if you don't need video accelleration, but I use Arch on the daily, so that's probably why I feel that way.
I also find that Fedora was pretty nice as well, but felt too bloated for what I needed.
Finally, Alpine was amazing. I used to use it as my daily driver for a while as well, and it is nice, lean, and easy to use. The main downside is that it uses the musl libc meaning sometimes packages won't work, or things won't compile. That was very uncommon though and the exception , not the rule.
The main problem I've had on ALL of those distributions were the clock. The Raspberry Pi doesn't have a built-in clock, so you need to use NTP to pull the time down, or else it'll be extremely out of sync. This means setting up your timezone, etc. RPi OS does this for you, but most DIY distros (Alpine, Arch) will not, so you'll need to set that up.
I've used alpine for minimal container images, but never as a workstation or server (or arch for that matter). Config management isn't an issue, I already ansibilized my config and a significant amount is removing crap I don't want for Ubuntu so maybe going minimal and installing exactly what I need is would be cleaner. Hmmm. Tempting.
I've only ever used Ubuntu 64-bit on my RaspberryPis without much issue, but honestly, all I ever use them for is hosting docker containers for systems that generally work out-of-the-box. I don't have them clustered in any way (yet). I'm not doing anything fancy (yet).
If you or anyone else has a suggestion for an OS that is super slim and runs Docker, I'd love to hear about it. I don't need the desktop environment whatsoever.
So the only "problem" I had with Ubuntu before this terrible upgrade was having to uninstall snap (which isn't straight forward to do since it's so engrained but also not terrible) because it uses a non trivial amount of resources for the little rpi - CPU, memory, start up time - just existing. I also found myself removing other packages/config because I found it annoying, like the motd/apt notice to upgrade or subscribe to some kind of "pro" plan for some security upgrades, ESM something? That raised my eyebrow.
I have plenty of respect for Ubuntu, it's just leaving a bad taste in my mouth lately so I'll let them simmer for a while as I try out another distro. I'll probably end up with something red hat based, but I won't have time to look until the weekend.
I run pure debian on mine... it runs great and I just like Debian in general because everything is an apt install away, at least for what I need.
I use Manjaro for nearly all of my pi’s, mostly because it is arch based and supports newer libraries.^___^
I use Debian testing for my RPI 4, minimal install, no issues. Also booted from usb.
Hello,
I am going for dietpi. That a minimalist with many auto installers/configurators. I run a docker swarm on this distro, it work pretty well. https://dietpi.com/
Regards.
Fedora recently added official support for RasberryPis and having tried it on another ARM board before I can't say anything bad about it.
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