Dear Armbians,

We’re excited to announce a new Armbian release: Armbian 24.5.1 Havier! This release focuses on stability and UX improvement, with an emphasis on stable builds and the hardwares we support the most. The changelog of this release is just massive!

Key highlights

Reproducible Armbian OS and Armbian build framework are tightly connected. Framework can build custom Debian or custom Ubuntu. Armbian Ubuntu is made from LTS or latest packages and is cleaned from all Canonical packaging including snapd. By default, we provide the latest critical packages also in the LTS package base. Armbian Jammy and Noble comes with highly optimized, specially built for each hardware platform, on top of mainline kernel 6.6.y or from SoC vendors, ZFS 2.2.4 and always the latest deb packaged Chromium, packed as .deb, comes with 3D and video acceleration where possible, VS Code, Thunderbird, Firefox, preinstalled Linux Userspace x86 and x86_64 Emulator on aarch64 hardware and several others. Armbian provides cleaned, improved, but stays close to the standard Debian and Ubuntu experience. To keep 100% compatibility, we tend to keep things that work well as they are. We stick to a minimalistic approach – less is more.

Excellent Hardware Support

Armbian excels in providing exceptional hardware support for single board computers. Our team maintains a large and diverse selection of hardware. We specialize in Rockchip flagship SoC RK3588, and Allwinner devices, we look forward to adding more Qualcomm devices. Our highly productive developer community integrates everything into the fast and user-friendly Armbian build framework (SDK).

Rolling builds

We are aware that many of you would like to run the latest code. For this reason, we provide daily rollercoaster aka rolling builds with Debian Testing / Trixie or Ubuntu Oracular, also with desktops which are under heavy development, such as KDE Plasma. We delayed releasing those in our stable channel as they are too immature.

Unofficial Images

In addition to platinum or standard support, where we usually have at least one person behind, Armbian provides many unofficial images for boards that are not fully tested and supported at https://github.com/armbian/community. Most of those images work just fine, but are untested.

If none of the ready-made images suits you, build your custom version of Armbian image. Perhaps you want to start your own Linux distribution? By using Armbian, this becomes very easy! We provide complete tooling.

Home Assistant and Other Tools

Do you want to speed up installation of your Home Assistant to almost any device that is out there? We provide ready to run images for many, but you can build your own in no time with the help of the build system and its extension framework. Which is in use to automatically build Home Assistant, OpenHab and Armbian Security (Trixie with Kali Linux tools). This provides a clean security oriented experience.

Recommendations for Production use

For production environments, we recommend:

  • hardware that has platinum or standard support label. For devices with these labels, we have people who are maintaining the code and we offer professional support.
  • using stabilized point releases around Armbian Linux 6.6.y and user space Jammy and Armbian Bookworm.
  • becoming Armbian Silver or Gold support partner to get access to professional services and help us pay common software support bills.

How Armbian cover the bill?

1% of software development, that comes without fun factor, is covered by the community donations. Any loss we are trying to mitigate with the help of partners. Sadly, a large part of the R&D bill still remains unpaid. We are mitigating this by dropping support on areas where loss is the biggest. If we do not receive enough volunteer help or funds from professional support, support degradation will become noticeable 6-12 months after we stop maintaining certain sections.

If you would like that we continue investing our precious time on the same level, perhaps on different levels, you need to step up and help.

Remarkable Contributors

We extend our heartfelt appreciation to the individuals who have contributed immensely to the growth and success of Armbian.

The Armbian superstars of this release: @rpardini @igorpecovnik @ColorfulRhino @amazingfate @paolosabatino @efectn @hqnicolas @chainsx @belegdol @viraniac @FantasyGmm @lanefu @kernelzru @JohnTheCoolingFan @alexl83 @pyavitz @brentr @Tonymac32 @aiamadeus @monkaBlyat @SteeManMI @hzyitc @The-going @EvilOlaf @iav

Support Staff: Didier, Lanefu, Adam, Werner, Aaron and many others have dedicated their expertise and time to provide support and guidance.

We also extend our gratitude to our esteemed partners. Your contributions and support are invaluable in shaping the Armbian community and its success.

Thank you for your continuous support to the Armbian community!

The Armbian team