A first choice for many single-board computer (SBC) enthusiasts, Armbian is a lightweight Linux distribution that gives you a highly extensible user experience that can run on various configurations.
It is offered in two distinct flavors, one is based on a minimal Debian base, and the other is based on a lightweight Ubuntu base.
A few days back, Armbian 23.11 was released with many changes and improvements. Let's take a brief look at the new changes.
Armbian 23.11 “Topi”: What's New?
Dubbed by the developers as a “pretty special” version, Armbian 23.11, code-named “Topi” is meant to be the result of a decade worth of work that has made Armbian a popular choice for SBC tinkerers.
Let's start with the key highlights of this release:
For starters, the Armbian support policy tiers have been tweaked to reflect better reliability and assistance for boards. The three tiers are:
- Standard Support, where boards will receive full and consistent support.
- Staging Support, this is tailored for boards that are undergoing support validation.
- Community Maintained, these boards depend on the wider community for maintenance.
Under this, four new boards were added to the Standard Support tier; Khadas VIM1S, Khadas VIM4, Texas Instruments TDA4VM, and Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro.
Additionally, support was also added for boards such as the NanoPi R6S/R6C, Mekotronics R58X-Pro, Inovato Quadra, and Tanix TX6.
On the user-facing side of things, various fixes were made to the display managers across all the desktops, inclusion of a mainline kernel for Rockchip RK3588 with experimental HDMI and EDK2/UEFI support.
Furthermore, the edge kernel offering of Armbian now features Linux Kernel 6.6, and features new Armbian wallpapers. There are also a few bug fixes to improve hardware support for existing boards, fix display output issues, handle compilation issues for various kernels, and more.
You may go through the official blog to dive into the fine print of this release.
📥 Download Armbian 23.11
Armbian 23.11 is available to download from the official website. The developers have also introduced two new daily builds, one with Ubuntu Mantic Minotaur and the other with Debian Trixie.
For existing installations, you can follow the official documentation to upgrade to the Armbian 23.11 release.
💬 Will you be trying out this release? Let us know below!
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