Armbian 23.05 Brings Debian Bookworm Based Images, i3 Desktop Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Armbian 23.05 Brings Debian Bookworm Based Images, i3 Desktop Support

Armbian 23.05 is out today as this Arm-focused Debian-based Linux distribution effort is approaching its tenth anniversary...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Armbian-23.05-Released

[docontra]

Happy armbian (bullseye nee bookworm) user here! Did the (unsupported) dist-upgrade which went pretty well all things considered (the only real snag was that the ethernet interface name changed on my board -- helios4 -- leaving the DHCP server running on it stopped, but network came up just fine on boot). My only worry right now is that the kernel that's supposedly shipping on the brand new downloadable images for my board (6.1.30) is nowhere to be seen in the armbian repos, but here's hoping this gets sorted out in the coming week(s)

PS: There are two good reasons to consider armbian:

• For SBCs running on eMMC/SD cards, it's much kinder on your storage than most other distros (armbian has /var/log on a ramdisk, synced periodically to persistent storage)
• For PCs and proper PC alternatives, it's a way to get mostly vanilla *buntu (as in uses Ubuntu repos for most software out of the box vanilla) without snap

[guglovich]

Builds based on the Debian 12 package base (Bookworm) have been started.
Added official support for a user environment based on the i3 window manager.
Improved armbian-installer, armbian-config and armbian-firstrun packages.
Optimized package base which is unified for different builds and selected user environments.
For different package bases and different user environments provided the opportunity to use a single application package (Application Package).
Improved Ubuntu-based builds. Superfluous service "Ubuntu advantage" is removed from the builds. For browsers regular packages are used instead of snap.
Added support for NanoPi R6S / R6C and Khadas Edge 2 boards. Improved support for RK3588, BPi M5, rockchip64, Odroid M1, Odroid XU4, Raspberry Pi, OrangePi Zero, Orange Pi Zero 2, NanoPi R4S boards.
Added sudo, wget and htop utilities to the minimal set.
Added fonts-noto-color-emoji package to display Emoji in the terminal.
Linux kernel packages updated to versions 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3 (depending on boards). The kernels have ExFAT FS assembly enabled by default (CONFIG_EXFAT_FS).

[Draget]

I am really really happy that the Armbian exists. I use it extensively and support it via Librepay and hope the project will keep on rocking for a long time! Best SBC disto!