Armbian Desktop strikes back. Gnome, Deepin, Mate, Xfce, Budgie will come to ARM devices.
Armbian is known for its excellent server images for ARM devices. They are all based on Debian and Ubuntu. Soon there will be images that will also focus on the desktop. This is fantastic news, because many ARM devices (for example, Pinebook Pro) are strong enough to be able to enjoy the benefits of graphic environments.
A lot of test images with environments: Gnome, Deepin, Mate, Xfce, Budgie have already appeared on Armbian servers. As of today, the KDE environment will not be available.
KDE was initially added, but was later removed because, as Armbian developers wrote on Twitter: “(…) we have no resources to maintain more than two desktops – additional will exists if someone wants to maintain them. Documentation how to add them and support plan is still in the works. Ain’t hard but requires time and dedication. (…) “.
Help Wanted!
Of course, testers are needed, so if you’d like to help Armbian developers build new desktop images, check out here:
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16895-2021-year-of-the-armbian-desktop/
Documentation
For end users, if you just want to build image interactively and by choosing supported OS variants, things hasn’t changed much and should just work while advanced documentation has changed significantly. Its pretty much WIP and is scattered around in those files:
https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/desktop/config/desktop/README.md
