Raspberry Pi’s are solid devices for DIY projects, and they’ve gotten pretty powerful and capable over the years. The latest iterations — Raspberry Pi 4 and 400 offer 8GB RAM variants sufficient to run heavy distributions like Ubuntu and other ARM Linux distributions.
However, there aren’t a lot of good Desktop distributions for Raspberry Pi apart from Ubuntu and Ubuntu MATE. So, we have some good news. An ARM variant of Pop!_OS will be available soon.
Pop!_OS on Raspberry Pi: When Will it Arrive?
System76’s Principal Engineer, Jeremy Soller, shared a picture on Twitter of running the Neofetch command from the Pi 400. He referenced it to the Tweet, where he shared a link containing the binary arm64 packages.
The image shows that it’s a 4GB Raspberry Pi 400 running Pop!_OS 21.10. We can also see the memory usage, 558MB/3741MB (Probably at idle). This is impressive as even Ubuntu MATE uses around 700MB of RAM at standby.
This indicates that the build that Jeremy is running is probably a heavily trimmed-down build with bare essentials. The processor is Broadcom’s 2835, which is a 64-bit Quad-core SoC.
As of now, there’s no official release date for ARM, but considering that 21.10 is the next Pop!_OS desktop release, and the Tweet with Pop!_OS 21.10, It’s FOSS predicts that the ARM version might release alongside the official desktop release.
Pop!_OS on ARM device is excellent news since it’s the only Ubuntu-based distribution after Ubuntu MATE to be available on Raspberry Pi. This move will probably push most of the other distributions to start developing for ARM-based boards and devices.
What do you think of Pop!_OS on Raspberry Pi? Let us know your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below.
