Ubuntu's ARM Is Good

ARM Computing has gone mainstream with Raspberry Pi and Mac M1/M2 chips. Harnessing this in a Linux desktop can be interesting. This is where I started using Ubuntu again.

[Clarkzer]

Every day, ARM in general appears more and more viable for general end user use, examples like this, M1, etc, become much more viable solutions especially in situations where you need to only sip power.
"Feeling like a desktop" is arguably the most important thing for most end users, and that gap bridges all the time.

[ALEDAMAS]

about the problem with YouTube
the SoC doesn't have hardware decode for av1
disable that and you'll be using VP9

[baddealrage]

Good to know Ubuntu is leading in ARM space. Microsoft did announced new Ampere Altra ARM servers in Azure that cost way less than x86 beefy servers. I am curious to know how much faster or slower these machines are in daily tasks scenario.

[nubfaceforthelose]

I digress? You've been watching some jay's 2 cents :)

[mhelmreich]

I am using Ubuntu mate desktop on a Pi400, which is pretty good as well.
I have it mounted on a table saw to let me access CAD, office, PDF, and calculator tools.
Having a simple all in one keyboard is quite handy.

[EmmanuelGoldsteinUK]

Disappointed that the sign behind you doesn't say "May the SOURCE be with you" xD

[Jens_DL]

I have been using Ubuntu arm for about 2 year on oracle cloud and never had any issues

[musiqtee]

Great! I’ve been running a r-pi 4 8 GB (remember those…?) with Ubuntu server for nearly 18 months. Not because I’m so “smart”, just because it was my first pi, and I didn’t know anything practical about Raspberry’s own OS. Took some tinkering back then, but that’s history. The thing runs a slew of docker stuff, and outside of me disconnecting it during thunderstorms, it’s just doing its job very reliably. However, I skipped the desktop/GUI. Plenty of muscle for my (not always) smart house. Plan is to get a couple more, and go “HA”, but that’s not happening right now, thanks world economy… 👍

[Simon_i]

How do I get Linux Brave browser for Arm64?

[dw]

Very sweet Chris! You are *REALLY* up on the technology! Thanks so very much for what you do!

[ArniesTech]

I actually like the idea behind Snaps and I learned to appreciate GNOME 😁

[MLGPRO-dxfg]

You can try to enable hardware decoding in the firefox config. I don't know what codecs this chipset supports, but on most machines Firefox still uses software decoding by default, even when they tell you that it doesn't.

You can also enable gpu web render and gpu accelerated canvas in the firefox config and hopefully get a big speedboost.

[JamieStuff]

I've run Manjaro for ARM on my Pi 4, and hadn't noticed (hadn't checked, either) dropped frames under Firefox. I've found Manjaro to run a bit more smoothly than ALARM (Arch Linux for ARM).

[MillennialGloom]

Hey my man, just got back into computers this year...built a macbook air M1 16mg ram....running sequoia beta & fedora arm64 remix - bare metal.

Bought a snapdragon thinkpad as well x13s 16mg ram...arm64 windows 11 and ubuntu bare metal.

Cant wait for better riscv laptops.

[christopherjackson]

The graphics/video are the remaining issue with desktop arm. It never feels snappy the way x86 does with graphics accelerators. From the command line it's hard to tell the difference. But I still am not sold on the desktop.

For context the most powerful arm desktop I've used is the pi 400

[tacioandrade]

I provide services to some startups here in my city and in one of them, due to Brazilian legislation to deal with city hall data, it was mandatory that the data be stored in Brazil, not even the backups could be placed outside the country according to the lawyers .
For this I started to use the ARM servers from Oracle Cloud, where we stayed practically until last month in the Free Tier and only now we started to use a hardware capacity greater than that and the price and performance of the Ampere servers from Oracle Cloud, encouraged me quite.
The only thing that makes me a little sad about Oracle Cloud is not having support for RDS with PostgreSQL, for example, but as we are using MySQL in this project, it is running very well, so much so that in the future we are thinking of maybe going to AWS, however, we completely gave up on the cost and performance of ARM processors for NodeJS and even DotNET Core applications.

[davidkachel]

Chris, just for future reference, I recently was surprised to discover that the fastest Linux system I have found for a Rasp Pi thus far, turned out to be Ubuntu Mate ! It even beats The Pi system. Of course, you have already found what you want for your Orange Pi project, but put this little grain away somewhere, in case you need to look at it in the future.

[Aleksander-Prokopowicz]

Oooohhh Chris. YT Playback on ARM Linux can be easly improved:
1st. Use Wayland based DE ( Gnome / KDE Plasma ),
2nd. Most up to date Mesa / GLX / Vulkan libraries fix allot of isues with hardware decoding.
3rd. Don't be afraid to tweek brave://flags or chrome://flags in chromium based browsers. You can than test is Hardware decoding working using brave://gpu or chrome://gpu

[ArniesTech]

OpenSUSE's ARM is pretty sweet 💪😎

[jonnypeace]

Ubuntu Server is my goto server of choice. So much to like about it. I only have one Ubuntu server running on Arm, and i have that as my router, with VLANS, bridged networking, firewall etc.