Armbian 22.02 Jammy XFCE

Les Pounder takes a look at a distro that supports 64 different Linux single board computers, and now he has to buy them all.

- Les Pounder

As ever, YouTube playback on the Raspberry Pi 4 is bad. The best we will get with 720p60 video is a slight stutter.

Armbian is a Debian-based distro designed as a framework for many models of single board computers (SBCs). Armbian is available for 64 different SBC, some of which we've never heard of. No matter which SBC we chose, they all claimed to be lightweight, fast and secure. So with these bold claims in mind, we fired up our trusty Raspberry Pi 4 for a test.

We chose the latest Armbian desktop release, Armbian 22.02 Jammy XFCE, which is based on Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" and uses the XFCE desktop environment. There's another CLI release that provides the bare minimum for a build. We tested Armbian on a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 running at stock speed, which is 1.8GHz on our Pi because we have a later revision of the BCM2711 System on Chip (SOC).