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!
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
They have ARM versions of Silverblue and Kinoite, but they don't provide patches or the installer for Apple Silicon Macs
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.
Right, I didn't think about the RPi. Perhaps you could check if there's an open feature request for this, and if not, create one.
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.
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.
Gentoo. I tried on a Pi 4 works pretty well, though no an easy installation.
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
I nearly had a heart attack until I read the word "ARM" at the end.
It seems like ARM Arch is doomed for whatever reason.
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)
