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I'm a huge advocate for Arch on desktop machines, but it's probably not ideal for a server running on a RPi unless you particularly enjoy babysitting it.
I used Dietpi in the past but I've had best luck recently with the official Pi OS Lite. Hardware support is perfect; any software you may run is likely tested using the official distro so idiosyncratic issues pop up less often; plus general community support is excellent.
I see, this aligns with my previous experience with Arch on Pi. I guess I’ll stick with Pi OS Lite for now. Thanks!
My spouse and I both use Arch (we use Arch BTW) on our desktop PC's. We also have a Pi, an ODroid and now a Dell Optiplex running as a game server. Our media server has DietPi which is an option I would recommend.
My spouse just tried Arch on the Dell and found it would have done great as a server but more work required to get stuff set up, especially with ensuring dependencies are installed. So he scrapped that idea and went with tried and true DietPi.
We've messed about with a few different flavours of server distros over the years and it's always come down to what we need the server to do, feature set and ease of use and configuration.
It's been a while since we last used RaspiOS but every time we've given it a go, it's never lasted long because it's always given us problems and just hasn't suited our needs as well as DietPi has.
RPi uses a lot of software hacks to get its low-cost hardware running. It is certainly doable on other distros, but using anything but the official ones on RPi is asking for trouble, and you better know how to deal with device trees, etc.
If you want SBC that is more standard-compliant and has better mainline driver support you should look at e.g. Pine64's SBCs, such as RockPro64.
I reaaaaaaally want to avoid purchasing new hardware, I feel bad enough about buying my Pi before finding out it’s actually not that well suited for my needs at the time (media server.
I'd recommend going with the vanilla Raspberry Pi OS then. Sure, it's not as lightweight as one would usually hope from a SBC OS, and it has the usual problems that apt has, but it general, it works. It has the firmware stuff ready, so no hassle with that. It has device trees set up in a generally-usable way from the get go, etc.
I didn't go that route myself and spent couple of days trying to get hardware acceleration to work where I wanted with the VideoCore chip, after which I gave up. VideoCore just isn't that well supported by the general software stacks, but this was a year or so ago, so it might've improved.
Also note that this is all RPi4 specific. Older RPis work quite well.
I've used Arch on an RPi 2 back in the day. It works just fine, and fun to play with. But at the end of the day, you don't want things changing every day on a server. I'd recommend going with Raspberry Pi OS; it's relatively light, well maintained, and just works.
Pi 4B and Compute Module 4 should have mainline kernel support since 2021. The device tree is present in the repo under broadcom.
Arch Linux should work pretty flawlessly now, you can follow AArch64 Installation section in https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-pi-4 and give it a try.
I’m running Arch on my RPI 4b+ and quite happy with it.
The installation was pretty simple IIRC - I did run into some issue with uboot which was easily solved by searching for the error on the internet.
Arch Linux ARM ships with a mainline aarch64 kernel and uboot by default, but if you are interested in running the RPI kernel and their boot loader, there’s a custom pacman repo and instruction on the forums: https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16144
All in all I don’t think arch needs that much maintenance on a non-critical home server - just make sure to check for config updates every now and then and reboot after kernel upgrades.
I used Arch ARM on a couple of Pi W, but support ended for them (fair enough), so had to move those over to Raspberry Pi OS to continue using them.
But, everything else is running Arch... Pi W2, Pi3, and they're all solid.
I have used several distros on RPi4 8GB. This is what I learned: If you want some type of desktop, then RaspiOS is the most responsive out of the box and can be made even better. If your doing pure server stuff, I found Vanilla Debian, or even Ubuntu server are well done for RPi4 and just work. However their desktops are not optimised and way slower than RaspiOS.
Oddly, I have not tried Arch on RPi4, but since mainline 6(.1) kernel, I believe everything is supported including UEFI.
I have several RPi 3's and 4's (automated sprinkler systems and mini desktops like I'm using now in my lounge) all running UEFI, booting direct off USB disks (no sd card needed), no fsckery needed. (I do keep UEFI updated from github, but its honestly not necessary now - just how those devices originally were installed.)
Armbian. Aside from some minor inconveniences, typical from a Ubloatu install (unsolicited openvpn, cron, network-manager) its a breddy gucci distro.
I run NixOS my Pi HomeServer. It gives you a lot of flexibility, if you don't mind reading into how the config/build process works.
My server configuration can be found here https://github.com/LukasKnuth/homeserver
Hello, OP. I'm currently using Orange PI 3 LTS as my home server and this thing is even less commonly known and less supported than Raspberry. I have spent couple of days trying to make Arch ARM work on this board but at the end I gave up and installed Manjaro ARM which is basically Arch with some of stuff preinstalled (but not too much in the minimal edition). It was super easy to install and run, and now I happily use my Orange PI with Arch-based distro. Maybe you also can give it a try
I've used raspberry pi os and shortly arch arm, both work ok. I remeber having an issue with some python packages on arch arm, but thats it. Personally I chose Debian testing for my headless pi4 and have been happy. It's running Syncthing, Mariadb, a few python scripts to pull data from pi pico-w. FTP server for IP cameras recording, Pydio, Pihole, and Gitea.